brainstorming for UDS-N - Performance - disk footprint

[Stephan Hermann]

On Mon, Oct 04, 2010 at 10:05:33AM -0700, Dustin Kirkland wrote:
> Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > Perhaps only slightly related to performance, but we need to work on
> > our installation disk size footprint and CD size. We keep shipping
> > fewer and fewer translations, and we grew some fat in installed
> > libraries.
> >
> > There's also the idea of merging the Ubuntu Desktop and Netbook
> > flavors into just one CD image, which will also take some extra space.
> >
> > This includes:
> >
> >  * Searching for and eliminating duplicate libraries, programs, etc.
> >
> >  * Reduce programming language support, or eliminate unnecessary parts
> >   of it. E. g. in a custom OEM project we eliminated Perl, and
> >   perhaps we could also remove some parts of Erlang/Python/etc. that
> >   we ship by default.
> >
> >  * Eliminiate unnecessary files (duplicate fonts, documentation); a
> >   rather bold proposal would e. g. be to remove package changelogs
> >   entirely and instead provide an easy way to open the changelog for
> >   a particular package in a browser.
> >
> >  * Optimize images in packages, as proposed by Louis Simard in May.
> >
> >  * [Your idea here]
> 
> Hi Martin,
> 
> Thanks for bringing this up!
> 
> I like the idea of moving almost all documentation to the web.
> manpages.ubuntu.com has both an HTML rendering of every manpage, as
> well as the .gz original manpage.  The 'dman' utility can remotely
> retrieve manpages from m.u.c and display them on a console.  It could
> easily be enhanced to cache them locally in /var/cache, too.
> Generically, it would be awesome if there were a web API for most of
> /usr/, such that a custom tailored wget or curl utility could remotely
> retrieve them on demand.
> 
> From a server perspective, we're less (immediately) concerned with the
> size on the CD, as we are with the footprint of the installed system.
> 
> I'm proposing that we offer 3 install methods from a single 11.04 Server CD:
>  a) Install Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud
>  b) Install Ubuntu Server (Deluxe)
>  c) Install Ubuntu Server (Minimal)
> 
> The minimal install would be as small as possible, with no recommended
> packages, and a pruning of documentation, manpages, and any other
> unnecessary overhead like unused kernel modules.  This system would be
> a great building block for appliances, virtual machines, and
> single-purpose servers.  This would embrace and enhance JeOS, and make
> it easier to install, directly from the Server CD, as a
> supported/tested mode of installation.

Do you really think that makes sense?
I think the default CD image of ubuntu-server is already oversized for a small
footprint of server installs.
What I would like to see is to generate images from scratch for different
usecases.

e.g. VMWare instances could need the open-vm-tools kernel modules, but need to
be tweaked to not install the recommends because of bringing in some X utils,
which is not needed for a server (I would like to raise this as well in a bug
report, to change from recommends to suggests)

e.g. a bare metal HP server with bnx2x nics needs the bnx2x module (which is in
the default kernel already) and the
(non-free?!) firmware for it. We could build some scripts which are created
images with specialized module and firmware support, which can then deployed
manually via CD or automatically via image (or much better via FAI) over the
network.

the vmbuilder script was a good approach (but not in a usability way) and could
be improved.

> The deluxe install would be a full featured, friendly server, with a
> healthy set of useful utilities and sane defaults.  For the deluxe
> install, I'm suggesting, perhaps, ssh-enabled-by-default,
> byobu-by-default, and etc-keeper-by-default, and I'm open to other
> ideas -- what do you *always* install on every Ubuntu server you
> deploy?  Too often, I perceive, we have been preempted from doing
> wonderful things to the Server because many people want the Server to
> be basically Ubuntu Minimal (or Debian Minimal).  That's a fair
> request too, and for those people, we should more conveniently offer a
> bare minimal installation.   But we should also stay true to our roots
> (Linux for Human Beings) and ensure that Ubuntu Server Deluxe is a
> great starting point (Linux for Human Sys Admins).

Honestly, "deluxe" is "a small footprint" as default install + special packages
which are changing from admin to admin. e.g. lsof + nmap + htop or whatever.

etckeeper byobu and sshd enabled by default should be the default for the
server install, eventually asking "which VCS backend do you want to use" via
debconf/preseeding + asking for the location and username + password

Most people I see on the #ubuntu-server channel are mostly not human sysadmins
but are people who want to install ubuntu on a server and are lost, because
there is no desktop. I think we need to make a difference here, and really
communicate the difference between a server + a workstation for administrating
the servers.

Regards,

\sh