On 7/15/05, Jason Ackley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Rod.. Whitworth wrote: > > > What I am looking for are comments from people who have tried some of > > these techniques and have experience on some facets of competeting ways > > to do the job.
I've tried a couple of different "disk on flash" and Sandisk flash drives in the 2.5 IDE laptop form factor. These can be found cheap in small capacities, but will eventually fail due to repeat writes to the same block -- the most commonly cited example of flash killing disk access is 'fsck' under Linux. Some flash disks have a hardware write protect switch. > I also prefer the flashboot method as it allows me > to rebuild the kernel/ramdisk and simply copy over > a single file (the built kernel with ramdisk attached) > instead of having to worry about multiple files. . . . > > Using spinning storage begs the question as to whether either flavour > > will automatically spin down when idle for some time? Alternatively can > > I do this another way? Normally this is done automatically by power management, or see 'atactl'. > > I can get the 4801 working with any of the above storage. Who wants to > > plug one or another as a lay-down best choice? > I certainly don't know if my method is the 'best', I would > say it is the 'best for me' based on my requirements > (no moving parts for storage, single file to upgrade the > device, fast/easy power recovery/no fsck) The most common deployment scenario for flash-based OpenBSD would be firewalls. It can be very handy for a firewall to have some local writable non-volatile storage, for configuration data, logs, etc. Kevin Kadow
