Re: Paring down NetBSD

On 11/07/2012, at 12:46 AM, Andy Ball wrote:
>    Do you pare down your router/firewall installations?
> What are you able to omit Vs. an ordinary NetBSD server
> installation?

I don't know about Dave, but I usually just throw base.tgz and etc.tgz =
on embedded boxes. Modern storage has outgrown base.tgz so much that it =
normally isn't worth the mental effort of stripping a system down any =
further.

>  DPM> I use sparc64 (Netra X1s mostly...tiny, cheap, low
>> power) for that stuff.
>=20
>    I understand those are quite energy-efficient.

That is almost certainly not true. Power requirements for any given unit =
work of are dropping all the time, so it isn't hard to get new hardware =
that will be much more efficient than old hardware. By efficient, I mean =
CPU throughput per watt, although power supply efficiency is also =
improving. Last year I finally bit the bullet and replaced a small bunch =
of sparc64 and i386 boxes with a single Xen server. Everything runs =
faster, my electricity bill went down and that room is no longer the =
warmest room in the house. If it will do the job, just buy an Intel =
Atom.

> I need to learn how to net-boot it though and how to tailor
> a NetBSD image for a diskless environment (for this and
> other embedded applications).

I have a system for building images to do that at =
http://home.must-have-coffee.gen.nz/hg/software/miniaturise/. It does =
have a couple of flaws: 1) it can use syspkgs, but syspkgs isn't =
structured in a way that is very useful, 2) the configuration file =
format is at best OK. Now that I'm self-employed, I'll be putting some =
time onto working on that software some more.

Cheers,
Lloyd=