On 2009-05-11, David Walker <davidianwal...@gmail.com> wrote: > I have an ALIX (one of those little x86 boxes). > As it uses CF as storage (limited read/write cycles) I want to mount > it read only.
I use a bunch of CF based systems, and mount most of them read-write. I've done so for years, and haven't had any problems as a result. I've got a 64MB card that was written regularly for 5+ years that still works (decommissioned as the motherboard it was attached to died). I've had cards fail, but mostly after just a month or two, and other identical cards bought at the same time in the same conditions (similar number of write/erase cycles) have been totally ok, so I'm putting that down to individual bad cards. I mount read-only on some machines to avoid fscks: for remote systems where untrained staff might need to power-cycle or if I'm worried about power failure. That's the only reason. > As OpenBSD writes information to disk during normal use I would like > to mount as much as possible in RAM (mfs) so that normal operation > continues. > For instance during boot, unless I mount /dev in RAM I get a whole > bunch of error messages (a whole bunch). :] > Also the pf log spits errors at me quite regularly - no surprises there. > > Originally I mounted /dev and /var in RAM with the following (cat fstab): > /dev/wd0a / ffs rw 1 1 > swap /dev mfs rw,-P=/populate/dev,-s=16384 0 0 > swap /var mfs rw,-P=/populate/var,-s=32768 0 0 > swap /tmp mfs rw,-s=16384 0 0 > > Hey I solved my first problem (I think). > I was going to ask how to populate (-P) the mfs mounts without having > to duplicate the original directories on my CF (/populate). > I think I could populate them straight from the original directories. :] If it were some other filesystem, you could mount once, cp, umount, then mount under the different path. Not really an option for a ramdisk which is destroyed at umount time though... I keep two copies of /dev, one in /dev (for single-user boots etc), and one in /dev_src which is used to populate the MFS. At upgrade time you need to copy the new MAKEDEV in, and re-run it. You can have a smaller /dev if you adjust the -i value. e.g. swap /dev mfs rw,nosuid,-s=4096,-i=1024,-P=/dev_src 0 0 > Anyway, are there other ways to populate mfs mounts with system files? > Is there any way to mount only the specific files I need? > For instance if I never use a specific log file is there any way to > not mount it? No. You could adjust the path of some file in syslog.conf and newsyslog.conf though. There is also the option of using a circular memory-buffer for logs, see syslogd(8) -s, syslogc(8), syslog.conf(5), but you probably need to write to some other things in /var (e.g. /var/run, /var/tmp; they could be symlinks though). At least if a file is never used, it's not going to take a lot of space on the ram disk :-) _______________________________________________ Openbsd-newbies mailing list Openbsd-newbies@sfobug.org http://mailman.theapt.org/listinfo/openbsd-newbies