[Soekris] "Squashed" versions of FreeBSD

[Bill Maas]

Hi Crist,

On Tue, 2008-07-08 at 11:41 -0700, Crist J. Clark wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 04, 2008 at 11:28:15AM +0200, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
> > Crist J. Clark writes:
> > > My only real worry is that I've not broken out all of the stuff from 
> > > the /var that I should and I may get "dead spots" on my CF from too 

Set up an experimental box, mount everything except /var R/O, leave it
running for a few days and see what happens? A properly set up system
(e.g. OpenBSD) would not give any errors, but yes, there are always a
few hardheaded programs that want to write to /usr/progname/etc and the
like...

> > > many write-cycles earlier than I need to, but at $40, it's a risk I 
> > > can take. I'd be curious about any advice on that front.
> > 
> > $40 isn't much. The sudden and unexpected downtime if/when the box 
> > breaks may be a great deal worse. Depends how simple and cheap it will 
> > be to get it back up.
> 
> I may be wrong, but I didn't think the failure mode would be
> a "sudden and unexpected" downtime. I had assumed I'd start to
> see read/write errors like you see when a HDD slowly gets
> bad sectors.

That's exactly what I've seen with a TakeMS cheaper-then-cheap CF card
with no wear-leveling, going bad. It took about 6 weeks going from 1
recoverable read error every 2 days to a torrent of error messages (>
100/24 hrs), so keeping an eye on the logs should do. Of course with a
strong YMMV reservation, depending on the card you are using.

Bill

>  However, rethinking that, I'm not sure what to
> expect.