[Sussex] Soekris question for Steve D

[Andy Smith]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 08:03:02AM +0000, Steve Dobson wrote:
> However, Ronan asked about my Debian install.  Debian is a distro that
> is not designed to run in flash, it is designed to run off a hard disk.
> It writes back to the file system to much for flash.  To run Debian on
> the system you really need a disk system supporting you. This is the
> best way in my experence - it has the most fiddleability of the various
> setups I've tried.

A standard install of debian sarge will easily fit in a 256MB
compactflash, is trivial to make run with a read only fs, and can be
installed with the normal installer booted via PXE on a soekris.

> It also means your logs survice a crash - like on power failure.

My logs go via syslog to a real server.

> If want you want is a no moving parts firewall for your home network,
> that just does the job, then one of those Lynksys WRT54G (which runs
> Linux IIRC) is cheaper.

Doesn't have a proper serial console, and it's far too fiddly to
compile my own software for.

My Soekris firewall is a pretty standard debian install that I can
keep up to date in exactly the same way as all my debian servers,
yet draws about 12 watts and has no moving parts.

> neither the Linksys or M0n0wall provide that.  Debian does, but in my
> experence you need a disk for that.

You just haven't tried very hard :)

Here is the total amount of files needed in a writable tmpfs to have
a normal-but-minimal debian sarge install work flawlessly:

$ sudo find /dev/shm -type f | wc -l
36

Most of those are some log files that I choose to keep there rather
than feed to the logserver.

When I want to do an apt-get upgrade all I do is

$ sudo mount -o remount,rw /

first.

These times are extremely rare given that sarge only gets security
updates and there is hardly any software installed.

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