On Fri, 26 Sep 2008 18:21:06 +0000 (UTC), James wrote:

> > Bear in mind the limited write lifetime of flash memory. Don't
> > put /var or /tmp on such a card if you can avoid it.
> 
> Well, I'm not sure any other alternatives are attractive? Unless
> I find a way to mount those partitions off of a usb stick, or
> some other idea?
> 
> Since they are not frequently updated and have minimal installed
> software (iptables on firewalls and DNS on DNS servers) accompanied by
> the fact that most devices have internal wear leveling; it should take
> many years to reach the write cycle limits?

What about /var/log? The various logfiles are written very frequently.
Could you NFS mount this from somewhere else? I wouldn't rely on wear
levelling in a CF card, only on an SSDdrive.

> > http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=10448
> 
> very cool! exactly what I could not find.

I used one of their adaptors to run a MythTV frontend from CF, although
it netboots now. I used a variation on a live CD setup, so the card was
not written to.

> > You could dd the card to a file and use the same file every time you
> > need a new card.
> 
> Um I do not mean to be a pain, but could you provide a little bit
> of pseudo-syntax? Assume I have shutdown a 4 GB CF firewall card
> and moved it to a reader/writer on another machine. First I need
> to format the raw (new) 4GB CF card from a reader.
> 
> /media/sdb1 shows up, but when I run 'fdisk /media/sdb1' I get:
> 
> last_lba(): I don't know how to handle files with mode 40755
> You will not be able to write the partition table.

/media/sdb1 is the mount point, not the device node. Use

dd if=/dev/sdb of=CF.img bs=4096

to read the card, switch of and if to write a new one. Of course, all the
cards have to be the same size.

> In the past I have formated the CF cards on the new machine being built,
> but I need help figuring out how to do this, from a CF reader/writer
> on another machine (thus avoiding a traditional install) ?

You don't need to format at all if you dd the whole drive, as that
includes the partition table, MBR and the kitchen sink.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Rude alert, rude alert! A fire has knocked out my voice recognition
unicycle. Many wurlitzers are missing from my database. Abandon shop,
abandon shop! This is not a daffodil, repeat, this is not a daffodil!

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