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

Benjamin Fowler somelamer567 at gmail.com
Sun Aug 10 13:03:48 EDT 2008


Hi All,

> 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 get the gist of what Greg is trying to say here. I've had a good look at
Yawarra's catalogue, and their boxes are exactly what I had in mind.
However, if possible, I'd like to go one better, and get an understanding of
how they package up the OS, so that there's no need to write to secondary
storage after boot to maximise shelf life.  Apart from that, it's awfully
tempting to consider just buying one of these machines off the shelf, and
then worry about this problem iff the vendor goes defunct.

Cheers,

Ben.
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