Hi! On Thu, Sep 04, 2008 at 06:19:30PM +0200, Paul de Weerd wrote: >On Thu, Sep 04, 2008 at 04:46:07PM +0200, Paul de Weerd wrote: >| Oh come on .. there's no challenge in 16M. Less, that's where it gets >| really interesting (if you're in to BSDM, of course ;)
>OK, at 8MB it runs with a non-GENERIC kernel, still booting with all >the default services (including ntpd). Logging in over ssh is slow as >molasses, but it works (swap is not an option - it's mandatory now ;) That were times when encrypted/kerberized telnet was really useful, back then, when I really used small boxen as router. Even with more RAM, ssh was *slow* (because of CPU) on some boxen, while e/k telnet was quite fast still. >[...] >The first idiot to send me a dmesg of a working (real, no VMWare >trickery like I'm doing) machine with less memory can come by to pick >up a better machine (at least with more RAM) for free. (I may have >more machines I want to get rid of and am too lazy to take out to the >trash, first come first served) About 10 years ago, I built a dedicated bridge-only system, using a 386 or 486 (don't remember any more, it was at times when obsd actually *did* run, when GPL_MATH_EMU wasn't dropped from the kernel yet). It ran on *4* MB of RAM, highly custom kernel, of course. Floppy only, no hard disk. The only way to fix/customize the box was to generate a new floppy image on my build host. The floppy was derived from the very old kernel install stuff (crunchgen/crunchide based binary, initialization shell script, but not ramdisk, but floppy as root filesystem!). IIRC the box could be run without any fan, i.e. noiseless, and bridged 2 10-mbit coax based ethernets quite fine (fine in relation to what was fine *then*!). Kind regards, Hannah.
