[H-GEN] Flash drives and wear levelling: user experiences?

[Greg Black]

On 2008-07-31, Benjamin Fowler wrote:

[Some details elided, as we've seen several answers already, some of
them very useful.]

> The idea is to buy one of these and a CF card, put OpenBSD on it, and run it
> as a gateway box, while leaving my ASDL modem to just handle the phone line.
> 
> My only worry at this stage, is how to go about installing the OS on the
> compact flash card, and configuring everything in such a way, that I don't
> burn holes in the CF card.

I think Ben may have missed the point about building this kind of
system.  You build (or acquire a free, pre-built) OS image, burn it once
to the CF and never write to the CF again.  Your OS, whether based on
one of the BSDs or Linux, will support some kind of ramdisk (possibly
also with a union file system) which is where all the (limited) writing
will happen.  The CF will last indefinitely.

If you want to use a pre-built OS image but find it's missing some item
you need, you can just virtual mount the ISO on your regular machine,
add the missing stuff to the ISO image and then burn that to your CF.

I've been doing this for ages with some Yawarra[1] boxes.  The Yawarra
website has lots of good information about using this kind of setup and
they provide images for OpenBSD, m0n0wall, pfSense, Linux and iMedia
Linux[2].

I mention Yawarra because they are an Australian company, have good
customer service, and I am a satisfied customer.  There are, of course,
plenty of other sources of gear and guidance.

As for learning about CF service life when written to, that's an
entirely separate issue (which is of interest on its own, of course),
but I don't think it has anything to do with the project you described.

Greg

[1] http://www.yawarra.com.au
[2] http://www.yawarra.com.au/sw-osimages.php