On 2018-02-25 (20:17 MST), Bill Cole <postfixlists-070...@billmail.scconsult.com> wrote: > > On 25 Feb 2018, at 2:54 (-0500), @lbutlr wrote: > >> I used to do the same back int eh 90s where trying to slim down the OS was >> really worth the effort. Now though, a full base install is well under a >> handful of GB, or less than 1% of a small hard drive. > > There is also the independent issue of security. For many systems where you > have 'minimal' and 'full' options and maybe various in-betweens, lots of that > extra stuff you'll never use isn't just eating space, it has a vanilla > default configuration and enabled running services. This means you have an > attack surface whose scale and diversity adds to how much you need to do to > keep it safe without adding anything you actually use.
Really? What runs services automatically? The last time I setup freeeBSD 11.1 (last month) it wasn't even running sshd until I specifically enabled it. >> The package that don't matter are just taking a little bit of space, and it >> is hardly worth building a system by hand to save a tiny amount >> (percentage-wise) of space. > > But storage footprint is re-emerging as an issue with the rise of "cloud" > systems like AWS that bill for storage in fine granularity. Sure, it is > difficult to find a new physical machine with less than 256GB of SSD or 1TB > of spinning rust these days, but if you're running virtual machines on > someone else's hardware with that sort of root storage you are almost surely > Doing It Wrong and bleeding money pointlessly. By far the largest part of my base install is the ports tree, which is larger than the rest of the system combined. Excluding /usr/ /var/ and /mnt 2.0M /bin 91M /boot 3.5K /dev 4.0K /entropy 2.9M /etc 8.6M /lib 156K /libexec 4.0K /media 4.0K /net 4.0K /proc 7.8M /rescue 6.3M /root 5.9M /sbin 0B /sys 116K /tmp 0B /www 125M total (Ports is 4.5GB) The size of a sever is nearly all "user" data. Mail, web, databases, files for users. The underlying base system needed to just provide these services/data is tiny. -- Lady Astor: "If you were my husband I'd give you poison." Churchill: "If you were my wife, I'd drink it."
