Hi,
Just want to solicit some feedback on my dedicated server appliance.
Development is proceeding pretty well on these image ideas:
Boot-disk -- a stripped 2.2.18 kernel based on Oxygen and optimized for
providing minimal services on a single NIC. SSH and PortSentry built in,
but ipchains is not available because there's no routing. Everything is
built into a single root.lrp with centralized configuration (i.e. linuxrc
does everything necessary to initialize hardware and configure the system,
then an application rc will do everything necessary to initialize the
applications being served).
Setup-disk -- a rescue disk with tools to setup hardware (hard disk arrays
and such).
Application disks -- stripped and preconfigured applications arranged by
function rather than by tool. For instance, the first will be
Mail-bastion, which is postfix configured for bastion routing with a
global procmail that optionally filters spam and virii. The application rc
file will be stored under /etc and backed up to the Boot-disk, so
Application disks can be large CD-ROM or ATAPI-floppy images.
My question is, should I remove package capabilities entirely from the
user interface? In other words, I would use apkg to load packages during
boot, but once booted there would be no capability to add and remove
packages -- and since only the Boot-disk can be or needs to be backed up,
package backup code can be stripped down as well.
The motivations are simplicity and space. I want the end result to be dirt
simple, with the bare minimum of configuration and interactivity required.
I also want the boot disk to have lots of space for modules so people can
comfortably do things like RAID arrays on SCSI hard disks.
So, would the lack of an interactive package tool totally spoil a server
appliance for you?
--
Jack Coates
Monkeynoodle: It's what's for dinner!
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