LFS and I are old friends

So you're saying, I ought to work on getting the PoC done prior to worrying about slimming it down? Well, yeah that is something that has crossed my mind, but sadly, the way a pit bull will latch on to something, my brain latched on to the idea of HOW to slim down CentOS.

I will certainly be posting more on this, particularly the related scripts.

Correct. Here is a really basic how-to (the official documentation goes into MUCH more detail):

http://www.chrisgountanis.com/techni...etinstall.html

You'll be given the opportunity to install various package groups such as desktop environment, lamp server, virtualization, etc. and obviously you should not check any of these if you want the minimal install.

Good luck!

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ps You haven't explicitly stated your reasons for WHY you need to "slim down" CentOS. Are you aiming to install/support hardware with limited specs, such as an embedded device? In any case, if you want to tell us more about your target/goal, maybe we can give advice (or suggest a different distro). If you google "CentOS hardware requirements" you'll see that it is not a particularly "bloated" distro at all.

Well, I'm taking NetApp's ONTap and WAFL as my source of inspiration. That thing is LEAN, not on ounce of fat, but that's beside the point of the PoC. In the end, assuming this thing is actually a success of sorts, then I'd like to see it take on a more realistic role in an enterprise environment. When such a time comes, THEN there will be a need for an OS so lean, that its practically dedicated to dealing with the HDDs. Keep in mind that I'm thinking at the enterprise level, that means we're looking at dozens of disks. Since I'm basing this on NetApp, their latest offering can handle disks in the thousands. Yes, you read that right.

I suppose like you and zQUEz have probably recognized, I have my priorities mixed up. I should concentrate on getting the actual storage solution up and running before actually worrying about slimming down the OS to a point.

Besides, it this doesn't see the light of day for any of a few thousand reasons, I can always claim to have done it because I could, with help from some friends from the community

while I don't purport to know why NetAPP (I'm partial to 3PAR and even Compellent over NetAPP) does what they do, my impression is that having a slimer Linux install is more about the age of their product and upgradablility of their code.

They started way back when CPU's were slower and less capable and RAM was more expensive. Also the less packages you have installed, the less dependancies you have to be concerned about when you upgrade. Also, the less (in this example) NetAPP packages you are using, the less you need to worry about licensing and those packages being dropped from newer revisions.

The problem as I see with starting with a slimed down installation before getting a skeleton POC together, is you might be removing something that you could otherwise leverage to get started. In terms of getting started, you might want to look at the source for mdraid and opendedupe to focus your thoughts on multiple disk management.