Re: problems with debootstrap and stable or sarge

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• In reply to: Bob Proulx: "Re: problems with debootstrap and stable or sarge"
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Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 06:43:55 -0400
To: Debian users <debian-user@lists.debian.org>

Bob --

...and then Bob Proulx said...
%
% Hi David!

Hi! Small world :-) [Say, did you ever see my packet-radio-question
email?]

%
% I know that Colin Watson gave you expert advice and it seems like you

That, indeed, and I hope I am.

% are now moving forward. But I wanted to shift gears and ask a
% different question.

Okey dokey.

%
% David T-G wrote:
% > I have a trash-able SuSE system I want to use to do a chroot install
% > of Debian before trying it on my LFS-based server. I have extracted
% > the debootstrap package contents, have /mnt/suse81 ready to catch the
% > install, and have downloaded files to a handy /mnt/empty.
% >
% > For my first try, I pulled down 'stable' to the tune of about 1.5G and
% > tried
%
% Oh wow. 1.5GB! Do I understand that you downloaded the entire depot?

Heck, I don't know; I did a wget from a mirror and that's how big
'stable' was. I note that 'sarge' is less, too.

% Since you downloaded the files to the machine you are going to install
% upon I know that you have networking. Which means you can do a
% network install instead and only download what you need. You can do
% this in a chroot and I think avoid that painful download of things
% that you won't be using.

All of that sounds good, except

  1) I'm actually downloading to a server, not to this client, and then
  transferring to the client to try the debootstrap

  2) Although I'm grateful to have it at all, my DSL connection sucks;
  not only does it take forever to download stuff anyway but it's subject
  to going away at any time

  3) Similar but not quite the same as 2) I have in my time seen mirrors
  either incomplete, entirely unavailable, or just place slow

  4) Since I plan to do this two or three times for practice before
  trusting myself to do it on (or is that 'to'?) my server, and since I
  want to always be sure to work from the same base, I thought it best
  (at at least the most time-saving!) to download once and then scp
  repeatedly

Oh, and it doesn't help that the box doesn't serve NFS, so I can't just
mount the /home/Sources/Debian tree no matter how big it is; I have to
stay inside my /mnt/empty slice size as well!

Now, you may be able to shoot holes in each of those issues, and I'm all
for that. What I really want is a chroot-able install that I can perform
on my somewhat unique server (no keyboard, no video, no CD; a 4-line LCD
screen and a quad NIC, both of which I'll want to have configured so that
I can see what the machine is doing and actually talk to it) currently
running LFS so that I can then easily update as well as put on packages
rather than having to build the world myself each time.

At home I'm small enough that nothing backs up this backup server, and
it's actively in use as a data repository as well as for a few services,
so I'm practicing on a desktop also running a non-Debian OS so that I
know what I'm doing by the time I get to the server. If only I had an
LFS system to be more true to the target system -- but I ain't taking the
time to build one just for that last bit of accuracy :-)

%
% Usually I do a debootstrap using the live network and it only needs
% about 107MB to install a basic system. Then whatever else is whatever
% else and a basic x86 server runs in the neighborhood of 500MB in a
% practical configuration.

Not bad. I'll actually want a full development web server environment
including apache 1.3, php 4, mysql 3.23 plus 4.0 for playing, and the
usual gcc and all the rest, as well as NFS and Samba so that it can
continue to be a backup server, and I'm planning to put X on it so that
I can hit its display via VNC and have some long-term work open there in
addition to the day-to-day work on my desktop or [my wife's] laptop. All
of that is no problem, though; / (and its various backup copies on both
hard drives) is about 5G.

%
% The debian.org docs on this (this section written by the other Collin,
[snip]

Thanks for the links; I'll definitely read up. I've been working from
Erik Jacobsen's doc at trilldev and Karsten's twiki doc plus the helpful
pointers I got on this list a few months ago.

%
...
% Another very similar application is pbuilder. It uses the
% bootstrapping tools to build a minimal environment for building
% packages. That allows the dependencies to be completely known and
% controlled. I routinely rebuild those and they only take a few
% minutes. The resulting small image is around 110MB.

That's pretty tight :-)

%
% > Going back again, I downloaded about 700M in sarge and tried
%
% 700MB! Oh, gosh, that just seems so painful!

Believe me, it is. I'm solidly stuck in the fast-good-cheap triangle...
But the good news, if you could call it that, is that pool/ has jumped
from 2.0G to 2.1G during my writing of this note. Now to wait with bated
breath for the jump to 2.2G and beyond...

%
% Bob
%
% P.S. Welcome to Debian!

Thanks :-) Here's hoping I actually get there!

HAND

:-D

-- 
David T-G
davidtg@justpickone.org
http://justpickone.org/davidtg/      Shpx gur Pbzzhavpngvbaf Qrprapl Npg!

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• Previous message: David T-G: "Re: problems with debootstrap and stable or sarge"
• In reply to: Bob Proulx: "Re: problems with debootstrap and stable or sarge"
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