[RULE] do we need a spreadsheet of the software?

[Colin Mattoon]

On Mon, 24 Feb 2003 23:29:07 +0100

Some additional thoughts on network installs:

If NFS isn't desired, use HTTP only for initial installation. There's a reason for this, and I'll expand on it.  

1. A very minimal subset of RULE/RedHat could be made available at the RULE site. Just enough to set up a minimalistic, base installation of command line only machine. That's one of three directories that could be made available for RULE at this site. The RULE installer could connect to this by HTTP.

2. The newly installed minimal machine is equipped with an ftp client like lftp, and a second directory is made available for ftp download only of X and a window manager, and a few GUI applications. The two part installation means that there is only one protocol used for initial installation -- the toughest part for old hardware. Installation of X and a limited set of X middleware and applications is done after the base installation, and the machine is now robust, with swap space, and command line utilities.  All done with the standard RedHat RPM. 

3. The third directory at the rule site would contain an ISO.  This ISO would be downloadable by any technique, but would have to be mounted (or burned) locally for installation. The ISO would contain everything that is included with RULE.

This answers the problem of machines too small to download an ISO and perform a hard drive installation. Such a box is too small to run a lot of stuff anyway.  The two part installation gets it up and running when it is most vulnerable to installer crashes. The second stage wouldn't rely on the installer, just an ftp client and a set of instructions to follow.

The alternative, downloading an ISO with all the bells and whistles, makes a more fully featured installation available to those who have the hardware resources suited to running a lot of stuff.  At the same time, it prevents thousands of "kitchen sink" installations plugging up the RULE site's bandwidth.

So why HTTP?  It is even easier to set up a local HTTP server on a LAN than an FTP or NFS server. The ISO doesn't have to be burned to a CD, it can be mounted using the loop device in most kernels.  In fact it wouldn't be difficult to include a kernel with this compiled in as part of the base installation, and the second step for our hypothetical user would be to set up that first machine as an Intranet webserver for the purpose of enabling local network installs. In addition to the ftp client to get the ISO, a small webserver like thttpd would do the job, with some basic instructions posted at the RULE site.


Another couple of resources that might be linked at the RULE site are Freedos and Freesco Linux. A single floppy with Freedos will let the owner of a 486 SX fdisk and format a hard drive barely large enough to hold an ISO, and prepare the machine to install Freesco, a single floppy Linux distribution on the hard drive. While Freesco is typically thought of as a floppy only router/firewall distribution, it is very easy to set up as an Intranet webserver as well on a DOS formatted hard drive. It uses "snarf" as the download utility, and thttpd as a webserver. A 486SX 25 Mhz machine with a small hard drive and 8 MB RAM is what I've been using as my own with Freesco. 

With all of that, all that would be needed to download to perform network installs would be:

1 compressed file containing a floppy disk image of freedos and rawrite.

1 compressed file containing Freesco Linux.

After that the Freesco machine could download the ISO once, and serve it to the network for hundreds of installs.

It is all no charge, all GPLed and ideally suited to the sort of network that needs RULE.



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