On Fri, 10 May 2013, zlinw@mcmedia.com.au wrote:
A comment on Russell's post regarding koganmobile, the problem with this is the data per day is limited to 400Mbytes, this means one cannot simply get large items like even a CD image.
If you use a 56.6K modem you'll get a theoretical maximum transfer of about 400MB per day, so some people will be in the situation of installing Debian on such a limit due to speed. Also there are a variety of 3G plans with limits of 1G per month or less so it's worth considering how to solve these problems. http://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst#smallcd The above URL has small Debian images. For AMD64 it's 221M and for i386 it's 277M which is a surprise to me, I had expected that AMD64 stuff was bigger in every way - I guess that the range of kernel binaries for i386 is causing this. So it seems that if you have download limits then you could make a saving by getting the AMD64 install CD, but then over time you would lose based on AMD64 packages tending to be slightly larger than i386. Not that size is a good reason for selecting architecture when the difference is so small. The <300M CD will allow you to do a very basic installation without accessing the Internet (I did this a while ago with a system that wouldn't connect to the Internet). Then you can use other occasions to download the other packages selecting a less than 400M subset each time. A local installation of Squid is a really good idea if you have limited bandwidth. You can set the maximum_object_size of Squid to a large value and tell it to be very aggressive in caching .deb files (which should never change so you can override all the cache settings to store them for a long time - disk is cheap). A few years ago my parents connected to the Internet via a Three 3G phone. I can't remember their quota but it was a lot less than 6G per month, maybe 1G per month. That was enough for all their regular Internet access and updating their system to the latest Debian packages. When a new version of Debian came out I would login to their system a few days before the end of the month to start "apt-get dist-upgrade", that would use all their quota for one month and the start of their quota for the next (they were on pre-paid so it didn't cost them extra). As an aside, 3G Internet access is not designed for servers (unless you pay significant extra fees) and generally doesn't allow inbound connections. The way to solve this is to have a script run "ssh -R $NUMBER:localhost:22 mothership" when the system starts up. Then on the mothership host you run "ssh -p $NUMBER root@localhost" to login to the 3G connected system. I currently run dozens of Linux servers on 3G connections and I've had a bit of practice in dealing with some of these issues. Let me know if you have any more problems with such things. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/