On 10/1/2010 12:53 PM, Chris Knadle wrote:
On Friday 01 October 2010 12:08:24 Russell Polo wrote:
I'm running a laptop on a Compact flash disk
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1012554&l=c3cbb2ff8c&id=1645041910
I chose to use the CF disk because is was cheaper than the smallest
laptop hard drive I could find to replace a dead dead hard drive. ( I
think it was about $28 around the time I uploaded that photo)
CF cards have gotten very cheap lately. For the last few years I've been
running some Alix boxes by PC Engines [this is the current equivalent to the
2c3 boards I'm running: http://www.pcengines.ch/alix2d3.htm] using some 1 GB
CF cards from them that were $10.
I think I'm not going to get a full desktop OS to install on something
that small. Yes DSL and Puppy Linux will work but while those *work* in
a pinch , after a while I miss the modern convinces of a full distro.
(sshfs, flash,etc) I'm using a 8Gig CF card which has a full FC13
install , including open-office and still a gig or so free.
what precautions should I be taking (if any ) in addition to EXT2 and
"noatime" (so it doesn't update the access times for files ) should be
taking ?
ext2 + mounting 'noatime' covers the majority of it. One other obvious thing:
don't make a swap partition (nor a swap file) on a flash device.
And if you really care, store temporary files into a ramdisk to minimize write
cycles on the flash. You don't /have/ to do this if you don't want to, though
-- for normal uses like a firewall, I haven't bothered with this.
It's actually got a swap file enabled, but isn't normaly used. suspend
to disk (hibernate) uses it. Normally I just let it go onto standby.
(suspend to ram ) I don't have a lot of ram on this thing (512meg maxed
out) , its like a 10yr old laptop I got for free, but I think I should
probably map /tmp/ and ~/.mozilla/cache onto the ram disk. (or set
firefox to not cache ? )
I figure if the swap partition gets hosed, I could make a new one
shifting slightly away from the bad sectors. Not quite sure how these
things fail.. I get the idea that they remap bad sectors at the hardware
level, so that you don't really see a problem until the device has no
more spare sectors . Is that how it works?... It's been a long time
since I was working at the hardware level, where I did DOS int calls to
read specific hardware sectors of a 360k disk. I get the feeling there
are like 8 levels of abstraction between the user and the hardware now.
I have seen bad USB devices and CF cards. so far havn't had any SD cards
fail. I don't think I have ever seen one failed in a way that it was
read/only which is how I would like them to fail. I don't think any of
my personal stuff has failed at all, it's always somebody gives me a bad
card to see what I can do with it. .. It looks like a totally unreadable
device. (cant even read it with dd )
Worst problem I encounterd that I was able do anything with was somehow,
the filedir got hosed on a CF card in my wifes camera. Pictures she took
didn't show up in the list. I was able to make a dd copy of the card,
and scan for JPG headers and copy out the data. Recovered almost all the
missing images. ( a few that were fragmented came out corrupted ) then,
after I did all that, I learned about "magic rescue"
http://www.itu.dk/people/jobr/magicrescue/
The machine has no critical data on it. It's used only to run firefox,
ssh and vncviewer. I had Ubuntu on it but that didn't suspend/resume
properly and one day the drive failed in some way that it could not be
mounted by anything.
I reformatted the drive, installed FC13 a few months ago, has been fine
since. ( suspend/resume works )
suspend/hibernate/resume are tricky and are very sensitive to kernel changes.
Ubuntu tend to take a few risks in terms of their choices of how they build
their kernel; that has upsides and downsides. Red Hat, Debian, and others
tend to be more conservative. Not sure about Fedora, but I suspect it would
lie somewhere in-between.
Well, that's in line with my experience, Also since it's old hardware, I
get the feeling that a distro like Ubuntu isn't going to try as hard to
maintain support. Although both Ubuntu and Fedora support the old video
card in the thing.
--Russell
-- Chris
--
Chris Knadle
[email protected]
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium
Oct 6 - Creating Browser Extensions for Firefox and Chrome
Nov 3 - Open Source Hardware: Bugs, Beagles and Beyond
Dec 1 - IBM's Open Client Deployment
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium
Oct 6 - Creating Browser Extensions for Firefox and Chrome
Nov 3 - Open Source Hardware: Bugs, Beagles and Beyond
Dec 1 - IBM's Open Client Deployment
