Re: [gentoo-hardened] Tin Hat memory requirements?

[Natanael Copa]

On Wed, 2008-08-20 at 14:54 +0300, Jan Klod wrote:
> On Wednesday 20 August 2008 14:14:24 Natanael Copa wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-08-20 at 13:37 +0300, Jan Klod wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > > I am interested in setting up distro in RAM for file server, but the
> > > thing is: I only have 1GB of RAM (max in board). Since fileserver really
> > > doesn't require much of software, I was consider asking this question:
> > > can Tin Hat help here?
> > > How booting is done?
> > > How back-synchronization happens (from RAM to backup)? Only manually by
> > > copying?
> > >
> > > Hope you give some advices,
> >
> > If you dont need xorg you might want to take a look at alpine linux,
> > distro based on gentoo hardened with uclibc/busybox. It is designed to
> > run firewalls and vpns from RAM but can also be used for ISCSI, vserver
> > hosts, samba/nfs and others.
> >
> > during boot it installs all the needed packages to RAM. There is a local
> > backup utility that helps to backup your /etc to USB memory together
> > with the list of installed packages so get your configuration back.
> >
> > http://alpinelinux.org
> >
> > -nc
>
> Thank you Natanael, but, before I start long reading about it, what could be
> memory requirements for alpine

Depends on what you plan to run. You can boot it up with 16MB RAM but
then you have nothing in there but busybox and openssl.

> and is it a real hardened gentoo with portage
> accessible or, if not, how all the install / compiling is done there?

no. Its built with gentoo but the binary packages are converted to .apk
(which is a tar.gz with some extra files with dependencies etc)

The reason I don't use the gentoo tbz2 is becuase it does not support
package splitting (i.e separate documentation and developer packages
for /usr/share/doc and .h and .a files)

you can install precompield binaries using apk_add:

apk_add openssh samba

packages get installed in tmpfs. Running the local backup utility will
make sure your pacages are reinstalled next reboot:

lbu commit


There are around 500 available packages:
http://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/alpine/alpine/v1.7/apks/

The drawback with this approach is that it is too difficult to set up a
developer environment to build your own stuff from gentoo. you need
gentoo stage, gentoo portage + alpine overlay + a set of convert
Makefiles.


>
> Jan
>