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

[David Gwynne]

On 31/07/2008, at 8:31 PM, Benjamin Fowler wrote:
>
> 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.

I've been running OpenBSD on an Ultra 5 with a 1 gig CF card in it for  
the last two years now without any problem at all. I haven't done any  
tweaks to the install to avoid it burning holes in the CF card.

If you're after some extreme cutting down have a look at http://mindrot.org/projects/flashboot/ 
  and http://tilde.se/flashboot/.

My own advice is to mount all the filesystems with softdeps enable and  
noatime. Tweak syslog so that it logs to memory ring buffers instead  
of disk (syslogc is cool), or push them off to another host. Disable  
the nightly cronjobs. Mount /tmp, /var/tmp, and /var/run as mfs.

My final advice is don't stress about it too much :) Flash is cheap  
and getting cheaper.

dlg