light-weight rescue live CD?

[Douglas Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca>]

I'm running Etch amd64 and this is my first box without a floppy drive.
On previous boxes I've used Woody's boot floppies and some extra
utilities disks I've made to cobble together a text-mode rescue setup on
a ram disk.

Of course this won't work with my new box: SATA drives, LVM on raid1,
etc.  Knoppix is a huge iso and I'm on dial-up in the country (2K/s) and
will take 72 hrs via ftp.

Does anyone know of a debian-based rescue CD or USB image that's lighter
then Knoppix?  Knoppix seems to be overkill.  I just need a shell, raid,
lvm, and fs tools (so far, just like the installer rescue mode) but with
some extras like ping, tracerroute, perhaps mc, relevant man pages and
documentation?  I'd also like the ability to boot using a serial console
just in case.

Thanks,

Doug.