[geeks] Dell T105 server arrives

[Joshua Boyd]

On Wed, Apr 02, 2008 at 01:52:12PM -0400, Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> On Apr 2, 2008, at 11:29 , Joshua Boyd wrote:
> 
> >As I understand it, Vista is done in such a way that it is more of an
> >image copy.  Something along the lines of this process:
> >1) dd if=/dev/dvd/baseSystem.img of=/dev/sda1 bs=16k count=196608
> >2) Expand the file system on /dev/sda1 to fill the partition
> >3) delete unneeded files.
> 
> Vista's "base install" is huge though, so it makes sense.
> 
> Most sensible UNIX have tiny base installs.

I suspect that it would give noticable performance improvements for
systems like NetBSD.
 
> I'm not sure how this would work out for larger UNIX systems like  
> Ubuntu Linux.  The full image would be gigantic, so I'm pretty sure  
> that the image and delete approach would be pretty bad in that case.

Ubuntu isn't that big.  I have a lot a sub 1 gig installs of it.

Fedora or Solaris OTOH.

But, like NetBSD, I suspect that an OS that requires over 100 megs would
benefit from an image based installer.

> That's an interesting question: could I create 1GB or so NetBSD server  
> images, and expand FFS after the fact.

Personally, I don't use NetBSD enough to warrant that.

However, I would really love to see something like that for Solaris.

And I probably should figure out how to do this with ext3 and Linux.  I 
have been making a lot of CF based linux systems, and I'm finding that
CF is surprisingly inconsistant about the space available, enough so
that making a single master image then dd'ing it was failing a fair
amount of the time.  Ever since I've been rsyncing a directory tree onto
the cards (then using grub-install), which is painfully slow when I need
to make 3+ cards at a time.  However, the cards have a fair amount of
free space.  Actually, come to think of it, DD tended to be exceedingly
slow as well.  I think I need to get off CF cards (or find a better
sort) before I try to do much to improve things here.