Hi!

On Thu, Sep 04, 2008 at 06:19:30PM +0200, Paul de Weerd wrote:
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>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 ;)

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>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.

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>[...]

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>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.