On 25.10.2011 11:54, Per Jessen wrote:
Stefan Seyfried wrote:
On 25.10.2011 10:53, Per Jessen wrote:
For background see https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=669498
For me, the objective in using the minimum server select is to have a _fast_ installation that is a good general basis for a (usually headless) server.
Which means: nothing installed but sshd. Because nobody knows what kind of services you want to serve
Yes, that is pretty much correct. There are some basic services needed by the system itself though (postfix, nscd, acpid, dhcpcd, syslog, cron, ntp etc).
Of course I was a bit exaggerating towards the "embedded" side. However, neither acpid, nscd, dhcpcd, cron or ntp are strictly necessary. They can be installed later. (I would include dhcpcd still, "minimal" should at least be able to get a network connection so that stuff actually *can* be installed later ;-) XEN guests run very fine without acpid :) (yes, I know. acpid is small, just an example)
The resulting size of the installed system is largely irrelevant as a server will always have sufficient space.
Haha! Tell this to our 7000 VMs. Of course there is sufficient space, but it comes with a hefty price tag.
Okay, a point worth considering. Would a 1Gb root filesystem be too much?
Multiply the 500MB more with the 7000VMs. Look up the price per TB on your favourite storage vendor. Does that answer the question? :-) "minimal" being "minimal" is something I consider valuable. Probably two different "minimal" patterns would really be more useful: * minimal server (text mode) * minimal remotely useful server :-) the second one probably better would be "text mode server". Means: basically a pretty complete installation, good vim, aaa_base-extras, maybe even mc, but no graphical desktop and according libs. The problem is that both pattern need a maintainer. Ludwig is maintaining the "minimal server" pattern and is maintaining it towards "less is better". I'm fine with that. If you are bothered enough by it, maybe you could volunteer to maintain the "text mode full server" pattern? As you have experienced with the broken pattern in 11.4, patterns are best maintained by people actually using them.
Additional software/services (mysql, cifs, apache, bind, dhcp, cups, whatever) are not included in the selection, those are for the user to chose or add later.
Exactly.
The installed system must be generally suitable as a server, i.e. when I ssh to it for maintenance or tracing/debugging, I don't want to be missing anything.
This contradicts your previous sentence.
How? I don't have a complete list ready, but I want things like vim, man, strace, tcpdump and bind-utils available.
I consider man totally unnecessary on a server. Simply because I can look up the man pages on any machine on the network, so it is unnecessary to have any documentation on the common server machine. I also have machines in the network with all available Kernels since GM and all corresponding kernel-debuginfo installed. And even though it is highly useful (to load crashdumps and debug them), I would consider it severe bloat to have those many GB of stuff on every machine in the network. The same is true for "man". Given how often I need tcpdump, I install it if necessary. Of course the opinions on that might differ. But it is much easier to install minimal and then do "zypper in `cat mycustomlist.txt`" than it is to remove all that unnecessary stuff you never need, I'd vote for a "minimal" that really is as minimal as possible. -- Stefan Seyfried "Dispatch war rocket Ajax to bring back his body!" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org