Gentoo users and developers have asked before for the RelEng team to add a few tools and some "toys" to help repair or test features on the live-cd / minimal cds. Such bugs have been closed as the RelEng team has no interest in adding more deps to the minimal cds. Therefore, I'm opening this bug so interested parties can contribute with ideas and list of useful packages for an administration cd target for the amd64 and x86 arches. Please note that the goal of this is not to create a sysrescuecd like ISO - there's sysrescuecd for that already. My goal here is to add a "few" relevant tools and enable experimental features of the kernel to allow "some" repairing and testing. I'll reassign this bug to the release team if other members want to contribute or want to directly follow this discussion.
subscribing
I have been waiting years for rsync to get added to the minimalcd. I have not commented before because it seems to be a 'third rail' topic. I must admit that in all my years using Gentoo, the only tool i have ever consistently needed from the minimalcd has been rsync. I have had tons of problems with various hardware booting the livecd, not to mention it's huge size just o gain rsync. I would ask for vim, but I admit that with nano I can get the job done. I think I'm just going to create my own minimalcd in the meantime and then write a gentoo wiki page howto for all the rest that would like this feature. Unless a gentoo minimalcd maintainer or other enterprising would-be developer beats me to it ;-) Or unless it actually gets added to the minimalcd. Please don't flame me, and no, I am not dense, I have been following this issue for years and have kept low because of all the irrational bile that gets spewed by both sides regarding this very reasonable request.
I apologize for the successive posts, but I have found a potential solution for those in need (I am probably late to the party, I know...) There is a nice system rescue CD image along with excellent documentation (including how to customize the image) at http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page It is Gentoo-based and actively maintained. Nice alternative between the minimal-cd's compact size and the livedvd's whopping 2.6GB. It weighs in at 290MB (currently). I'm working with it now, seems okay :-) http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page
I too want rsync - it can be a very useful tool to have either during installation (i.e. rsync corporate configs into place) or for rescue purposes...
http://www.sysresccd.org/Detailed-packages-list It contains almost all that is needed for admin stuff. I'd either add a note + link to sysrescuecd or we create a image with a similar package list. 3xxM isn't that much IMHO.
Oh, without X of course.
17:55 <+CIA-100> jmbsvicetto * r801 /trunk/releases/weekly/specs/amd64/ (admincd-stage1.spec admincd-stage2.spec): Add initial specs for the admin cd - bug 352152. Initial specs added to the repo. Any feedback and suggestion to improve it are welcome. I'll see if I get them running on my server this weekend.
18:39 <+CIA-100> jmbsvicetto * r802 /trunk/releases/weekly/specs/amd64/admincd-stage1.spec: 18:39 <+CIA-100> Added multiple requests for the admincd specs: 18:39 <+CIA-100> sys-block/aoetools - bug 199444 18:39 <+CIA-100> app-misc/mc - bug 208076 18:39 <+CIA-100> benchmarks - bug 213228 18:39 <+CIA-100> ntfs resize - bug 287301 18:39 <+CIA-100> app-admin/testdisk - bug 311495. 18:39 < willikins> CIA-100: https://bugs.gentoo.org/199444 "aoe driver/tools not on install media"; Gentoo Release Media, Everything; RESO, FIXE; mennis:jmbsvicetto 18:39 < willikins> CIA-100: https://bugs.gentoo.org/208076 "Add Midnight Commander to LiveCD/LiveDVD"; Gentoo Release Media, LiveCD/DVD; IN_P; wolf31o2:jmbsvicetto 18:39 < willikins> CIA-100: https://bugs.gentoo.org/213228 "Add benchmarks (bonnie++, dbench, iozone, etc) to release media"; Gentoo Release Media, Everything; IN_P; beolach:jmbsvicetto 18:40 < willikins> CIA-100: https://bugs.gentoo.org/287301 "Would be nice if ntfs resize was possible with minimal install cds"; Gentoo Release Media, InstallCD; IN_P; bbannier+gentoo_bugs:jmbsvicetto 18:40 < willikins> CIA-100: https://bugs.gentoo.org/311495 "Please include app-admin/testdisk in liveCD"; Gentoo Release Media, LiveCD/DVD; IN_P; pacho:jmbsvicetto All linked bugs were addressed. Does anyone have any more suggestions before I start working on building the CD? @Christian, do you have any specific requests from the sysrescuecd package list? If not, I'll work on that list later.
(In reply to comment #8) > @Christian, > > do you have any specific requests from the sysrescuecd package list? If not, > I'll work on that list later. Yeah. Some of them may be included already so I'll just write everything... pwgen, sysstat, bzip2, cpio, gzip, mt-st, p7zip, pbzip2, tar, unrar, unzip, xz-utils, duplicity? some benchmarks?, cd / dvd recording tools, gnupg, hexcurse/hexedit, vim!, some forensics tools? colordiff, pax-utils, screen, tmux? eix with a pre-initialized db?, bash-completion, dos2unix, wgetpaste!, gentoo-syntax, perl, netcat/netcat6/gnu-netcat?, traceroute, tcpdump, nmap?, minicom, bind-tools, ftp/ncftp, irssi, curl, openvpn?, rsync! wget, whois, cciss_vol_status, diffutils, dmidecode!, dstat?, ethtool?, file, findutils, flashrom!, gawk, grep, hdparm, ipmitool, iproute2, less, man/-pages/-posix!, mlocate!, pciutils, sdparm, sed, setserial, sg3_utils, smartmontools!, usbutils, which, lsiutil, megacli, megarc, mtx, tw_cli!, dosfstools, lsscsi, lvm2, mdadm, ntfs-3g, ntfsprogs, htop! That's everything from the list which is IMO important/useful. I'll let you know if I miss anything else. And robbat2 should read this, there may be some HP tools or so which would be very useful for us(infra) as well.
Packages requested in the previous list, not already present, were added to the admincd specs. I didn't commit the following as that's not a list of packages: cd / dvd recording tools some forensics tools Even though eix was already in the specs, I don't know what to do about the db. We either need an ebuild (live ebuild?) providing the db or we'll have to add it to a root_overlay.
The first build for amd64 can be find on my server[1]. [1] - http://www.jmbsvicetto.name/releases/admincd-amd64-2008.0.iso
Current builds can be found in the following links: http://www.jmbsvicetto.name/releases/amd64/hardened/ http://www.jmbsvicetto.name/releases/x86/hardened/
I'm going to close this bug as the specs are done, the admin-cd was added to the amd64 automated builds and I've been building it on my build box and skimmer. If you hit any issue with the admin-cd or have any requests for it, please open a new bug.
Documentation of the purpose (features) of the admincd target over minimal would be nice, I have looked in quite a few places, and it is mostly guesses or angry comments in gentoo forum or stackoverflow. Should this be mentioned in the wiki in some good way?
(In reply to Christian Nilsson from comment #14) > Documentation of the purpose (features) of the admincd target over minimal > would be nice, I have looked in quite a few places, and it is mostly guesses > or angry comments in gentoo forum or stackoverflow. Angry comments in the gentoo forum?! Impossible! :p > Should this be mentioned in the wiki in some good way? Yes. Feel free to create an account on wiki.gentoo.org and propose some text.
Haha, Thanks for the reply! If I could, I would, but I don't even know what the real differences are. ;) But if no-one has a good explanation here then of course I can try to diff it out and try to come up with my own explanation as to propose and differences. I'm still hoping that someone better suited than me can shed some light, before I start wandering to far in the darkness.
(In reply to Christian Nilsson from comment #16) > Haha, Thanks for the reply! > If I could, I would, but I don't even know what the real differences are. ;) > > But if no-one has a good explanation here then of course I can try to diff > it out and try to come up with my own explanation as to propose and > differences. Ah, okay. The admincd is a more fully-featured livecd. E.g., here's the list of packages on the admincd: https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/releng.git/tree/releases/specs/amd64/hardened/admincd-stage1.spec vs the list of packages on the regular minimal iso: https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/releng.git/tree/releases/specs/amd64/installcd-stage1.spec That's the main difference. > I'm still hoping that someone better suited than me can shed some light, > before I start wandering to far in the darkness. Please file a new bug where we can discuss this without 10 years of history :)
