[ale] Non-ramdisk based flash filesystem?

[Christopher Fowler]

Here is the DOM you need:

http://tinyurl.com/pv6l4

don't worry about flash writes.  I've been running these for years and
if I've not ran into a problem than you wont.  Do not
allow /var/log/messages to sit on flash.  That needs to be in the tmpfs.


On Tue, 2006-09-19 at 15:35 -0400, Christopher Fowler wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-09-19 at 15:27 -0400, Chris Woodfield wrote:
> > The situation: my firewall for the past few years has been a truly  
> > ancient Mini-ITX PC with an even more ancient hard drive running a  
> > low-overhead Linux install (iptables, ssh, not much else). The hard  
> > drive in particular is sorely in need of an upgrade - it's about 8  
> > years old and I have no idea how much more time it's got.
> > 
> > What I'd like to do is eliminate moving parts from this box entirely,  
> > and replace the drive with CF or USB flash-based storage. Given the  
> > write-cycle limitations of flash, every solution that's come up in my  
> > Googling on this subject gives me a ramdisk-based solution where the  
> > flash contains a filesystem image which is loaded as a ramdisk, not a  
> > live filesystem. The issue here is that the image must be "rebuilt"  
> > every time I make a change, such as updating an iptables rule, or apt- 
> > get update, compile a new kernel, yadda yadda.
> 
> DOM.  Go find yourself a 64mb or 128mb DOM.  Place that in the HDD
> connector on MB and make suer they give you a power cable.  A DOM can be
> powered by pin 20 on the MB but not all MBs power pin 20.
> 
> > 
> > What I'd prefer is a system by which I can mount the core filesystems  
> > read-only (which I can remount rw when I need to update files, while  
> > the more dynamic filesystems (e.g. /tmp, /var) are ramdisks, with the  
> > understanding that persistence between reboots is not possible with  
> > those partitions.
> 
> 1. ext2 on the root
> 2. tmpfs for all R/W sections
> 3.  Join them with unionfs
> 
> > 
> > The big question here is, what filesystems in a running Linux system  
> > can be mounted RO without causing issues? Of the filesystems that  
> > need to be RW, are there any that must be persistent between reboots?  
> > What other potential issues could I be looking at with this solution  
> > that could make an image-based solution more appealing in practice?
> > 
> 
> ext2 can be mounted ro.  Nothing needs to be persistent other than your
> config stuff.  Like rules.
> 
> 
> > TIA,
> > 
> > -Chris
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Ale at ale.org
> > http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> 
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