On Sat, Apr 14, 2007 at 08:30:15PM +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Tenze
> n writes:
> >Hi,
> >
> >I've a net4801 + freebsd-on-hdd setup running comfortably.
> >
> >I'm interested in lists members' opinions on whether there's any
> >particular reasons/advantages to ADDing flash-mem.
> 
> I do put CF cards in my systems in addition to harddisk, for two
> reasons:
> 
> 1. Having a NanoBSD image on the CF, gives a good platform for
> doing radical system maintenance work on the disk.  In some
> cases I have configured things so that a "degraded mode" service
> can be run from the CF card, until the HD can be fixed.
> 
> 2. A 4GB Flash card with a full NanoBSD system leaves 3.5GB free
> and that is a wonderful place to store backups from the harddisk.
> Ff the disk croaks, you can replace the disk, boot from the CF
> and make things right, without having to pull backups across a
> potential slow line.  Writing a foo.dump.gz file once per day
> is not going to wear your flash card out.
>
I'm very careful (perhaps too careful) about minimizing writes to CF, 
and have done the following:

- disabled swap
- mount / ro
- mount /var /tmp and dev off ramdisks, copied from relevant partitions
  (cp -Rp) in /etc/rc
- in the shutdown script, I copy back only the changes to the relevant
  slices.
- critical log files are written to another host

Vanilla openbsd 4.0, no longer have a HDD, 'just' 1GiB CF card.

Reading this thread I am wondering now if I'm being excessive, but
certainly if I had a HDD in this machine now, it would be the one that
is the backup medium!

Just want to get some feedback from you guys then, do you normally leave
a HDD in a soekris box, are these boxes doing that many frequent writes that
can't be buffered in RAM?

Cheers,
Jonathan. 
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