[Fedora-livecd-list] SSH defualt on livecd bootup

[David Zeuthen]

On Fri, 2007-04-27 at 14:00 -0500, Jasper Hartline wrote:
> David Zeuthen wrote:
> >
> > Mostly that ssh server key generation takes ages thus slowing down the
> > already slow boot process. Also, the passwords are all blank.
> >
> >     David
> >   
> I think the slow boot process is due to the Ext3 filesystem you have 
> decided to use.

I hate to repeat myself, but here we go. Using ext3 is a very conscious
decision:

 1) it support very quick live cd installs; just dd the data instead of
    doing an RPM transaction that requires you to carry at least twice
    the amount of data.

 2) ext3 actually supports xattrs so SELinux just works out of the box.
    This is pretty important from a "let's market Fedora" point of view.

 3) it's the standard file system used by Fedora

> Also, the SSH key generation doesn't take more than 6 seconds on a dual 
> PII at 300MHz, less than 2
> seconds on a Intel Celeron at 2.6GHz. That isn't exactly "ages". 

I seem to remember it's a lot more but whatever. Even if this was fast
it wouldn't make sense for generic live CD's to include this feature as
the passwords would still be empty. Custom live cd's is another matter
of course.

Btw, the key generation process is CPU-bound so it's a bit hard for me
to understand why you blame the file system since that's mostly IO
performance. I also don't think it's useful for you to make
unsubstantiated claims about ext3's performance or the lack of. Do you
numbers to back your statements up? Because if you have I'd love to see
them so I can pass them on to our ext3 developers. Thanks!

      David