[Nottingham] USB LiveDistros Persistance (or, Going Diskless)

[Chris Burton]

> Anyone played going diskless for their system?

In the old days I tried NFS root does that count ? :D

> There's the FAT16/32 LiveCD type stuff using squashfs with "casper" to
> save user changes into a second ext2 partition.

On my old WRAP (http://www.pcengines.ch/wrap1e203.htm) I have:

FAT16 on the CF card, with squashfs for the root file system and the 
kernel/initrc/etc
unionfs with a tmpfs and the squashfs from above
Then the root gets changed with pivotroot into the union so I get a 
read/write root

I've also added an "rc" script located in the FAT16 so I can alter little 
things (update exe/libs etc) at start up without creating another squashfs

> Anyone played with that
> and calling casper to save regular snapshots? How?

I'm not sure what casper does (do you have a URL?) but if you're going to 
write the changes back to the same USB what's the advantage over a normal 
read/write file system?

> Or a distro can be installed onto flash. Any variations already
> available that are flash friendly? What happens to the log files?

I don't bother with logs, but you could syslog them remotely.

ChrisB.