Hello, Background: I've been on a journey to migrate many servers (firewalls and dns) to Compact Flash (CF) drives to improve reliability, ease in new installation, ease replacing hard drivers that fail, duplicating drives that fail and cloning servers with a simple, straightforward methodology.
This is the CF method, later on I'll do a USB page, but, lots of older hardware will not boot off of usb, but if somebody wants to write to me a methodology for usb sticks, that would be cool. I'm not exactly the quintessential sys-admin, so as I outline my ideas and issues, please feel encouraged to help me make the efforts better. Hopefully, it will result in a wiki that everyone can use. Issue 1. Cost containment. Right now, I'm using 4GB Sandisk CF cards in vintage x86 and k5 machines without issue. I use CF-2-ide converters that are not labels, made in china. It'd be nice to be able to use some of the less expensive 4GB CF cards, but I have not tested any, and do not wish to purchase a random sample to establish confidence. Any one with low-cost CF cards that work reasonable well, just let me know. Issue 2. Ease of access. Currently, I had a bunch of old IDE chasis that are locked and come in a tray form. Once you install the tray, you can easily remove the tray from the front of the machine. The CF-2-ide converters which contain the CF cards are easily access. I do this because I have many of these old removable ide trays already. What would be better is to find pci internal slot cards that have the CF-2-ide built in and the CF cards would be accessible from the back of the machines. Any suggests for this type of hardware would been keen. Issue 3. Ease of purchase. I'd really like to find a single, low-cost supplier of the CF cards and the CF-2-ide converter hardware. Any suggestions? Issue 4. Cloning or Duplicating. As many of you know, installations can be quite time consuming, and challenging on old PCs. So what I intend to do is take and currently running machine and stream the contents to another machine with a CF burner or pull the CF card from a machine that is in good shape but shutdown and duplicate it. Two issues I see. 4A. Best method to duplicate the CF card live while the system is running. DD, cpio, scp (example syntax) in a step by step)? 4B. What is the minimal amount of data/files that need to be edited bot build a similar but unique machine. 1. IP address (edit conf.d/net). 2. Name (edit) conf.d/hostname). Anything else? James
