Re: OpenBSD 4.2 with ftp-proxy, named, spamd on Alix2c1 board (+dmesg)

On Thu, 21 Feb 2008, Klaus Botschen wrote:

>> Writing into /dev, /tmp and /var would definitely NOT "destroy the CF
>> card".
>
> Might be. I used none-industrial-grade CF cards, so the chance is of course
> higher.

Yes, I did it. Just let /var run full and try to log a lot of stuff and
you will write the same sector many times in a short period. Lead to an
unusable /var partition on a consumer SanDisk CF Card. The card was
pretty old, but I guess that there are a lot of low price CF cards out
there that have no real wear level algorithm implemented.

>> running for about half a year now, with all filesystems being regular
>
> Thats fine. The machines that got replaced by the Alix board have been running
> for almost 5 years, and I hope that I don't need to touch the boards for
> several years.

Putting /var on mfs is not such a bad idea if you got RAM to spare.
Using rsync to write the changed files back on the CF card in fixed
intervals and on shutdown should be ok.

>> - just using noatime is fine; should the card die one day, new CF cards
>> will be cheaper than a fart by then (and eight times as big, too).
>
> That might depend... I have the theory that if you are sysadmin, the
> machines "feel" when you are far away, and die exactly when you can't just
> drop in and repair them :)

Nice theory, would explain some hardware faults I witnessed in the past
:)

Kind regards,
   Markus