John Hearns said...

|On Wed, 2006-03-08 at 08:45 -0800, Stephen A. Smith wrote:
|> I'm part of a group that is setting up a Beowulf cluster (64 nodes with
|> dual procs (3.2GHz Xeons) connected via myrinet) with Scientific Linux.
|>  I was told to strip down the base install to reduce the install size. 
|I agree with what Paul Greidanus says. Just do a base install and don't
|worry too much about it.

I'm with John and Paul on this.  At one time
we tried doing partial installs (before hard
drives were commodity items).  Eventually we
gave up; it wasn't worth the effort and we
kept finding unexpected dependancies after
testing and deployment.

Now the only reason we ever do less than a
full install is for security reasons with
systems in a DMZ or on the internet.  (There
we do a full "server install" and then remove
everything not absolutely necessary.)