[Nottingham] USB flashing your distro?

[Andy Smith]

Hi Martin,

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 12:42:39PM +0100, Martin wrote:
> Install your favoured distro onto flash to be run read-only. Have
> workspace on a RAM partition. Use unionfs to pick up and make available
> any file changes. Write the changes back to a (writeable) "work
> partition" on the flash drive each hour or so and before shutdown...
> 
> The main idea is not to unduly wear the flash during normal use.
> 
> Yes, no, already done?...

Certainly doable, but generally pointless as modern flash media
doesn't have a low write cycle limit.  They will last for tens of
years while writing 24/7.

I have a firewall running from a 512M CompactFlash card.  I keep it
read-only purely because there is very little possibility of disk
corruption that way.  As it's only a firewall I just made it log to
a syslog server and have some tmpfs for the transient things it
needs to write.  I don't bother storing them.

Cheers,
Andy

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