Network Installs (was: Essential bloat)
Quoting Steve Dunham:
> Still, if we are doing away with the base floppies, we should make
> the network install of base.tgz a little easier to figure out, and
> add FTP and HTTP support. The "snarf" program is small and can
> fetch files from ftp and http urls; it could be added to
> boot-floppies to get this functionality. (I haven't looked at the
> 2.2 floppies yet, maybe they do this already.)
I've got to concur with this. An http client would be simple
and small. You could download baseN_N.tgz to /var/cache/ somewhere
and do the install from there. Hell, make it a
super-default-fallback, complete with a DHCP client.
And that's another thing that bugs me. I've been doing quite
a few Debian workstation installs at a place that uses DHCP.
Unfortunately, I have to hand code-in an address that I managed to
reserve, and then apt-get install dhcpcd.
~$ ls -l /sbin/dhcpcd-2.*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25872 Oct 5 11:41 /sbin/dhcpcd-2.0.x*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 21328 Oct 5 11:41 /sbin/dhcpcd-2.2.x*
Surely a 26k app could be included and if the new bootdisks
use 2.2, that's 5k cheaper. Mac OS X server (which a co-worker of
mine runs) asks simply "Are you on a network?", and if you say "yes",
it _tries_ DHCP before asking you for IP info. This strikes me as
good user interface design.
--
((lambda (x) (list x (list (quote quote) x)))
(quote (lambda (x) (list x (list (quote quote) x)))))
-- A LISP quine written by Seth David Schoen
+++ath
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