In <http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=126090233628943&w=1> Nick Holland gave a bunch of excellent reasons to just do a standard install on a cheap compact-flash (CF) card. Another point... with today's compact flash cards, you may well be able to simply ignore the issue of finite-number-of-write-cycles.
For example, 2 years ago I set up a home firewall using a 1GB Kingston CF card. For precisely the reasons Nick Holland outlined, I used a standard OpenBSD install (done by plugging the CF card into a USB-to-CF adaptor and then connecting the USB to my laptop). The only "interesting" things I did to reduce writes [and boost performance; the WRAP is a slow 586-class processor with only 128MB memory] were to make /tmp and /usr/tmp mfs, mount /usr readonly, and mount /var softdep. For the present discussion, what's relevant is that although I planned to try to make more of the disk readonly (maybe putting the often-written parts of /var into mfs), I never got around to doing so. And 2 years later, that firewall is still working just fine: # cat /etc/motd OpenBSD 4.2-stable (GENERIC) #3: Fri Dec 7 14:23:16 GMT 2007 Welcome to OpenBSD: The proactively secure Unix-like operating system. Please use the sendbug(1) utility to report bugs in the system. Before reporting a bug, please try to reproduce it with the latest version of the code. With bug reports, please try to ensure that enough information to reproduce the problem is enclosed, and if a known fix for it exists, include that as well. # cat /etc/fstab /dev/wd0a / ffs rw,noatime,softdep 1 1 swap /tmp mfs rw,noatime,nodev,nosuid,async,-s=65536 0 0 # note /usr is READ-ONLY /dev/wd0g /usr ffs ro,noatime,nodev,nosuid,softdep 1 2 swap /usr/tmp mfs rw,noatime,nodev,nosuid,async,-s=65536 0 0 /dev/wd0e /var ffs rw,noatime,nodev,nosuid,softdep 1 2 # I'm sure that original CF card would *eventually* fail if I kept it in service long enough... but it's a lot easier to just buy a new CF card and reinstall OpenBSD every year or two, than it is to fiddle with a non-standard installation. In fact, I may well not bother with the read-only /usr the next time I reinstall it... [Yes, I know, 4.2 is seriously out of date. I actually have a new 2GB CF card sitting on my desk ready for a 4.6-stable install, which should happen very soon...] ciao, -- -- "Jonathan Thornburg [remove -animal to reply]" <[email protected]> Dept of Astronomy, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA "If the triangles made a god, it would have three sides." -- Voltaire
