Re: [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.