When I was gathering pieces for my own ALIX box, I deviated from the Netgate script by buying some CF cards from Newegg. Some 1GB cards of dubious quality run as low as $6.50. I splurged and spent around $9 for some faster 2GB cards. "Faster" is slightly important, size is not - damned near any CF card will work, since OpenWRT is designed to run in a few megabytes, and copies many of the files from CF to RAM during boot. The ALIX, with 256MB of RAM, has plenty.
Another cost savings measure for this project would be to locate a large stash of high-quality small CF cards. I imagine there are professional photographers around town with a whole bunch of used-once 128MB cards, abandoned when they upgraded to larger and faster cards (you can buy a 32GB card for $90 from Newegg). The major problem with older cards is that they are likely to have slow write times. Practically, waiting 60 seconds to write a few megabytes to an older card, rather than 10 seconds, may be justified by the monetary savings. I will be running some speed tests on various cards soon, so I can quantify this. BTW, I am programming my cards with a "Digital Concepts" CF reader/writer that I bought for $13 at a suburban Maryland Radio Shack. It Just Works with my Linux laptop - you Windows guys may have more trouble :-). I bought it with a third CF card a 2GB Sandisk marked down from $90 to $30. The R.S. website shows they are on sale for $20. The point isn't that you should buy from Radio Shack, but that you can get the stuff to program these systems anywhere, and that the CF cards are not expensive enough to steal. They might be swapped by crooks, though. The usual saying in computer security is that there is no data security without physical security - if the bad guys can get at your hardware, they can bypass all your security measures. While I like the idea of easy maintenance, the fact that a bad guy can quickly swap a compromised CF in place of the PTP CF may create a security hole. I don't think we can stop a really clever bad guy, perhaps there are some software tricks we can add to the CF cards to make superficial tampering more detectable - perhaps digitally sign random portions of the CF image, and querying the systems remotely. Overall, I'm not going to lose much sleep over this - in a world dominated by Windows, where telephones are answered by gullible fools, there are much easier targets. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [EMAIL PROTECTED] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ The Personal Telco Project - http://www.personaltelco.net/ Donate to PTP: http://www.personaltelco.net/donate Archives: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.network.wireless.portland.general/ Etiquette: http://www.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/MailingListEtiquette List information: http://lists.personaltelco.net To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
