Re: Soekris-tech Digest, Vol 131, Issue 1

I had a net5501that lasted for many years w/ Fedora 8 on it w/ ext3 
rootfs (no relatime support yet) and saved the flash by setting up 
mounts to use "noatime" option so inodes aren't getting writes when just 
accessing a file and also made an early init script that would setup a 
ramdisk and mount that up on /var/log so all logs would be in ram (ok so 
you reboot you lose your logs but not a problem for me -- and logs would 
rotate enough it wasn't a problem).   Take care to have the script 
construct whatever directory structure your installed packages dictate 
that need to already be in /var/log i.e. /var/log/httpd for web server 
typically.

I would look at IDE interrupts going off in /proc/interrupts to have an 
idea once the server (used as firewall) settled into steady state -- 
when no IRQs for lots of a time period for IDE in /proc/interrupts, I 
would know that the flash wasn't getting used -- almost like having a 
read only rootfs.

When I upgraded to a net6501 instead of playing the flash games, I went 
with 2 x SATA 2.5" drives in a RAID-1 setup for redundancy and it's been 
great.

If you are using a recent OS that support the relatime option (check 
/proc/mounts) that will save a lot.  If not, consider adding the noatime 
option to your filesystem mounts -- the OS will access files all the 
time and it has to update the inode for the access time each time which 
means a disk write for just accessing a file -- yikes.

Good luck.

-Eric Malkowski

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>    1. Compact Flash lifetime/failure detection? (Philip)
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> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 10:32:14 +0000
> From: Philip <[email protected]>
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: [Soekris] Compact Flash lifetime/failure detection?
> Message-ID: <[email protected]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> The 4G CF card that I use to boot my MiniITX server died over Christmas.
> I pulled out the card, repartitioned and formatted it and tested it with
> F3write/F3read and most of the card appears to be unusable.
> This server is (was) running Debian with the CF card in an IDE adapter.
>
> I am now worried that my Soekris could go the same way.  That machine is
> net5501 running FreeBSD.
>
> Is there any early warning that I can get of CF card failure?  Are there
> any long life cards that are suitable for a general purpose OS.
> Should I just forget about CF cards and just boot a normal drive?
>
> thanks, Philip
>
>
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> End of Soekris-tech Digest, Vol 131, Issue 1
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