> Hi folks, > When reading posts about setting up a Soekris using a compact flash, I > see a lot of people saying that a compact flash cannot withstand a lot > of writing before failing. > > 1.) Is that true? How much is "a lot" of writing? (My 4501 is for my > tiny, home network)
Theoretically, it's true. Practically, if you buy a decent CF, it's not. See below for my experiences. > 2.) How do you set up an OS (either OBSD or FBSD) to NOT write to a CF??? Any partitions you don't want to write to should be listed as ro rather than rw in /etc/fstab. Or use memory backed filesystems. > 3.) If you set it up to not write to your CF, how does your Soekris > manage to create log files??? When I first started using Soekris hardware I was quite paranoid about this. I put everything which needs to be writable in memory backed filesystems. I had a cron job which would, every 30 seconds, take a snapshot of the filesystem, mount that, rsync it to a server 1800km away which had a hard disk, unmount the snaphot, and delete the snapshot. On restart it would rsync in the other direction to restore those filesystems to the state they were in at the time of the last completed snapshot. It checked to see that the most recent snapshot had completed, to avoid restoring a partial filesystem if the system happened to have died during an rsync. Now I don't bother with any of that. /tmp is memory backed. Other writable filesystems are on disk. They're not even mounted noatime, although they really ought to be. The system is still running fine, with the same CF, three years later. -- John Stalker School of Mathematics Trinity College Dublin tel +353 1 896 1983 fax +353 1 896 2282 _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
