I know that dd is one of those fundamental linux commands that are used occasionally but like rm need to be used carefully.
I admit to being a rather “Appliance” operator when it come stop Linux these days. I use the bistro as it is and usually install only the software and updates that are part of the distribution. In the past I did download the source of the latest version of software i wanted to run and compiled it after tweaking the makefile and sometimes some of the code. These days I do not do that very much. Lazy? Maybe but the distributions have gotten better at keeping things reasonably up to date and stable and bleeding edge is not my forte anymore. That being said I have been playing around with Raspberry Pi for the last few years. I tend to buy two or three of each version as they come out. I have two deployed for specific Ham radio stuff and am embarking on a project to help some friends out by setting up some Broadband Speed monitoring nodes. One of the shortcomings of the Raspberry Pi (RPi) is the use of SD cards. Even when you are not doing a lot of writing to the card the life of a card seems to be less than a year or so. I have read that the newer SDHC cards incorporate wear leveling much like an SSD does. With this in mind I want to set up an SD card but only partition it to use a third or a fourth of the disk space and leave the rest of the card free and unformatted for wear leveling use. My experience, thus far, is that when setting up a card for the RPi the distribution expands itself to use up the entire card. I want to try setting things up on an 8GB car. After everything is configured I want to create an image of the card and then write that image to a 16GB or 32GB card. Is there a parameter in dd to limit how much of the card is used and leave the rest as unformatted? Do I need to create the partitions on the 32GB card and image each partition separately from the 8GB card and write that image to a specific partition on the 32GB card? Is there some other/better way to do this? I want to try to get to the point of being able to set up a RPi and let it sit and run for years and not have to redo the card every year. Stories of servers stuck in closets or left in a wall void during remodeling come to mind. We had an APRS Igate node at Vanderbilt that ran the better part of a decade without a purposeful reboot that was running on a floppy drive distro that Sean Jewett and a few others worked on. I want that kind of longevity in the RPi nodes I am deploying. Thoughts? Suggestions? Questions? Bruce -- Bruce W. Martin, KQ4TV Trustee for AA4VU Vanderbilt University Amateur Radio Club -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
