On Tuesday 11 July 2006 01:29, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > 2. Small form factor pc with some sort of solid state memory running > > linux. > > I'm doing this at home. I'm running a cut-down ubuntu dapper > installation, initially installed as a breezy server then any packages I > didn't need removed, followed by a dist-upgrade to dapper when it was > released. It has about 200 packages and uses less than 300MB of flash. > > The h/w is one of those VIA PCs that Vini Engel was selling a month or > two ago. I've added a PCI NIC (an SMC card which was small enough to > fit in the case) and a PCMCIA NIC to give me LAN, WAN and DMZ. It took > some work to install the PCI NIC -- there were no holes in the back of > the case for it and the power connector was a bit too close to the PCI > slot, but it wasn't hard, just fiddly. > > It runs off a 512MB CF card via a CF-IDE adapter, because although the > board has a CF slot the BIOS can't boot from it. Apparently there is a > BIOS upgrade available but I couldn't find it easily, and the CF-IDE > adapter wasn't expensive enough for me to care. > > The box has a fan, but it's very quiet. I could probably disconnect it > without anything overheating, but the noise is insignificant -- there > are other much more noisy things in the room :-) > > I did make a few changes to reduce the number of writes to the CF card > to extend its life: > > - mount / noatime > - use tmpfs for /tmp (with a max size limit so it can't take all > the RAM) > - no swap > - syslog to a LAN host and stop syslog being restarted each day if > there are no local log files (causes a write to /dev) > - change ntp.conf so that the drift file is in /tmp and copy it to > /var once a week if it's changed (and on boot/shutdown). > > I think that was all. > > > The only caveat is that it (the fw) has to allow for a DMZ, and may have > > to run multiple internet (WAN) connections (I am currently > > I don't know whether any of the VIA motherboards have more than one PCI > slot. If not, you'd need to use a case with enough room for a larger > PCI card with more than one network port, or use a USB ethernet adaptor.
A lot of work. Satifying. http://www.ltsp.org does it more elegantly: main FS is RO /tmp is RAM writable stuff sym-linked to /tmp eg logs, dynamic xorg.conf etc About 200M last time I counted, although I used a 30M version in my olive-pickers (5s boot, wireless) http://tigger.ws/vtigger/main.php?g2_itemId=3985 (I don't use X here) James -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
