Re: Summary: experiences with NanoBSD, successes and nits on a Soekris 4801

On Sun, Jun 19, 2005 at 09:36:03PM +0200 I heard the voice of
Poul-Henning Kamp, and lo! it spake thus:
> 
> The major obstacle is the "cutting things down to size" process
> using NO_FOO options.

I have to wonder if exclusion is a better route than inclusion.

I've got several Soekris boxes (4501) out in production, running I
think a 4.7ish FreeBSD.  But I built up the images by including things
in.  I did a full normal buildworld, and a DESTDIR'd installworld.  I
didn't use any special options to trim out pieces of programs; just a
few simple tweaks like -Os compiling Then I used a list of the
programs, and used some ldd'ing and sed'ing in the Makefile to get all
the libraries needed and copy everything over to another staging dir.

Of course, manual tweaking for config files was needed.  I handwrote
the whole rc bootup process (independant scripts for ease of manual
fiddling, but with a hardcoded sequence for the bootup process).
Hand-trimmed passwd/group files.  I had to pull some libraries
manually (PAM was the major "offender" here).  And so on; not stuff
that would really fit in the NanoBSD schema.

I built them rather more general than the project required, so I
wouldn't have to carefully craft each future use; they had everything
necessary to do most networking jobs you'd stick a 4501 in for.  It
still came in around around the 20 meg line.


I found that it was a lot easier to say "Yeah, I want that" than "No,
I don't want that" and end up with a useful end-product.  Of course,
having it all in Makefiles so I could just add another program to the
list of ${SBINFILES} or the like, and run another ~10 seconds of
find'ing and cp'ing, made it easier.  Everything was otherwise built
normally, so there weren't unexpected things like "Whoops, PPP can't
do internal NAT anymore" or other non-standard behavior.  The downside
was mostly all the manual fiddling necessary on /etc to fit.


-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd_at_over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.