Examples of 'dpkg --get-selection > packagesinstalled.txt' for firewall

[Robert Thorsby]

On 2002.11.25 09:17 Alex Satrapa wrote:
> Every time I look at things like one-floppy boot systems, they always 
> miss something that I want.  So I end up going for a minimal 
> installation of some bigger distribution.
> 
> I have an ADSL router running Debian Woody, and I've trimmed it down 
> to 119 packages installed (about 153MB used). I was hoping to trim it 
> down further to fit it all onto a 128MB CF, but then I'd have to lose 
> stuff like NTP and OpenVPN (and that would only save me about 1MB all 
> up).
> 
> To cut it down further, I'll have to do stuff like:
>  - remove editors (use scp to copy files to a remote
>    machine, edit them there, then scp back)
>  - remove /usr/share/doc (though I'm sure this will
>    break packages)
>  - remove unused locales (could save about 8MB)
> 
> I'm not sure how much other stuff I can remove without breaking 
> things - for example, replacing bash with sash would break all the 
> scripts on the box. Thus I'm stuck with stuff like libncurses5. 
> There's other stuff like diff that I could probably remove if I knew 
> exactly which bits and pieces use it (eg: the setuid tracking stuff).

 From the contents of your Installed Packages you appear to be 
constructing something significantly more than a router-cum-firewall 
(which was, IIRC, the original question).

In fact, I would be reluctant to have such a distro as you propose as 
the OS on a firewall exposed to the outside world. However, YMMV.

Robert Thorsby