Re: [Soekris] CompactFlash cards and Soekris boards

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:12:40 -0700

Bill Maas wrote: 
On Thu, 2008-10-09 at 16:15 -0700, Oleg Smolsky wrote:
  
Hey there, I'm thinking of getting the new net5501 board and would like to find out the common way people use CF cards. I assume the board can boot from a CF card, and my question is whether can I create an ext3fs partition on the CF, mount it on / and use it as if I had a normal IDE/SATA drive? Or do I have to boot from a filesystem image in read-only mode?
    
Yes and no (in that order). To the Soekris comBIOS the CF is just an IDE drive, and you can format/partition/mount it any way you like. If you don't need to store excessive amounts of data and you can live with not-very-hot write speeds during installations and updates/upgrades, a CF card is in fact a much more practical thing than a real HDD, if only because you can get about 12 of them for the price of 1 HDD;).
Right, thank you for the reply - the main point is that it looks like an IDE device and can be partitioned like one. This is going to be a replacement router (iptables, openvpn) and I want to be able to run "apt-get install ..." on the box. The Debian install will be configured with no swap.

The next thing that I need to figure out is how to get /var into its own (cramfs?) filesystem and flush it to disk when the box reboots. Has anyone tried this type of thing?

Also, re: net5501 board - does it work with Debian's stock linux-image-2.6-686 (lenny) image? Is there any merit in building a more-specific AMD Geode kernel?

Thanks again,
Oleg.



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