[NTLUG:Discuss] diskless linux

[Ralph Green, Jr]

Howdy,
  Well this is second hand, but I thought it was interesting.  I just
upgraded my firewall a few days ago to IPCOP 1.4.  Version 1.4 added
several nice things.  One of them is support for running a firewall from
a CF card.  The memory requirements jump to 128 meg minimum.  If you use
a 256 meg CF card or bigger, it looks like it works pretty much like
normal.  To cut down on disk writes, they allocate a 64 meg ram disk and
store the logs there.  Once a week, or upon shutdown, they compress the
logs and write them to "disk".  The manual says they estimate a 5 year
lifetime for the CF card, which seems plenty long to me.  It might be
worth looking at IPCOP, if you are interested in diskless setups, just
to see what they have done.

  I have never kept a firewall more than about 2 years between rebuilds,
anyway.  My biggest concern would be whether CF cards would be available
in 5 years, since the format is being phased out in favor of smaller and
less usable formats.  I say the smaller formats are less usable because
I have not seen any inexpensive adapters that let you use SD, XD or the
like as an IDE drive.  The CF card is essentially an IDE drive and
adapters are cheap.  I don't think any of the other formats share that
virtue, but please inform me, if you know otherwise.
Good day,
Ralph

On Wed, 2004-11-10 at 00:11, Robert Pearson wrote:
> I am very interested in diskless environments. I am looking for
> someone who is willing to share their experience using something other