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

[Benjamin Fowler]

Hi all,

These days, you can get heavily cut-down all-in-one motherboards like the
following, with a built in compact flash slot, which makes it perfectly
possible to build a tiny low power PC without any moving parts -- perfect
for a firewall/router or TV streaming box:

http://www.netgate.com/product_info.php?products_id=450

I spent a bit of time today thumbing through a catalog and planning to order
some new hardware to play with.  I basically want to set up a couple of
cheap, cut down machines for around the house, starting with a cut down
firewall/gateway box running something like OpenBSD which is easier to keep
a close eye on than yum-cha branded off the shelf router hardware.

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.  Some CF cards allegedly have hardware
wear-levelling, which is good news (but slooow), but it seems like a good
idea to try to set everything up so that the amount of writing to the CF
card is minimised.

My question to the HUMBUG collective is; has anybody else gotten any
significant hands-on experience with working with cut-down machines running
off flash drives, and want to tell us their experiences, and what they think
is the best way to arrange the filesystem, etc to work well with flash
media?

Cheers,

Ben.
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