[Wylug-discuss] compact flash cards used as IDE disk....

[Jim Jackson]

On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, gARetH baBB wrote:

> On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, Jim Jackson wrote:
>
> > I'm assuming that you basically use it as a readonly boot media and would
> > run your system from ram disks one booted.
>
> Maybe a /tmp, maybe a bit of space for transient logs (though a syslog
> host would be more sensible) - most of these things are used for stuff
> like wireless routers, where the only thing it's really doing is network
> stuff from within the kernel.
>
> You could probably arrange things so you didn't even need /tmp, so no
> ramdisk at all - there are a few read-only dists out there.

Interesting. I should have thought of that as I once sysadmined an ATM
switch which was based around a Sparc board and Sunos with an "admin"
script accessed via an admin account. You weren't meant to know it was
unix underneath, but a quick single user boot, and bob's your uncle a root
account. They had set the root partition as mounted readonly - with
symlinks for changable files, such as /etc/mtab and some config files, to
a seperate writeable partition. I presumed this was to prevent
"accidental" damage. But a similar setup would be possible, with the
changable files in a ramdisk.

A couple of extra questions then, what sort of read speed do you get from
a CFcards - I assume pretty good, and if they do just like an IDE drive I
assume you can partition them etc?

Does nobody know the max rewrite limits for these things?

Jim