I had a net5501that lasted for many years w/ Fedora 8 on it w/ ext3
rootfs (no relatime support yet) and saved the flash by setting up
mounts to use "noatime" option so inodes aren't getting writes when just
accessing a file and also made an early init script that would setup a
ramdisk and mount that up on /var/log so all logs would be in ram (ok so
you reboot you lose your logs but not a problem for me -- and logs would
rotate enough it wasn't a problem). Take care to have the script
construct whatever directory structure your installed packages dictate
that need to already be in /var/log i.e. /var/log/httpd for web server
typically.
I would look at IDE interrupts going off in /proc/interrupts to have an
idea once the server (used as firewall) settled into steady state --
when no IRQs for lots of a time period for IDE in /proc/interrupts, I
would know that the flash wasn't getting used -- almost like having a
read only rootfs.
When I upgraded to a net6501 instead of playing the flash games, I went
with 2 x SATA 2.5" drives in a RAID-1 setup for redundancy and it's been
great.
If you are using a recent OS that support the relatime option (check
/proc/mounts) that will save a lot. If not, consider adding the noatime
option to your filesystem mounts -- the OS will access files all the
time and it has to update the inode for the access time each time which
means a disk write for just accessing a file -- yikes.
Good luck.
-Eric Malkowski
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Today's Topics:
1. Compact Flash lifetime/failure detection? (Philip)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 10:32:14 +0000
From: Philip <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Soekris] Compact Flash lifetime/failure detection?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
The 4G CF card that I use to boot my MiniITX server died over Christmas.
I pulled out the card, repartitioned and formatted it and tested it with
F3write/F3read and most of the card appears to be unusable.
This server is (was) running Debian with the CF card in an IDE adapter.
I am now worried that my Soekris could go the same way. That machine is
net5501 running FreeBSD.
Is there any early warning that I can get of CF card failure? Are there
any long life cards that are suitable for a general purpose OS.
Should I just forget about CF cards and just boot a normal drive?
thanks, Philip
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