Re: Making a Compact Flash-based installer

From: David Kelly (dkelly_at_hiwaay.net)
Date: 11/29/05

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    Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2005 13:46:07 -0600
To: tsuraan <tsuraan@gmail.com>

    On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 10:39:52AM -0600, tsuraan wrote:
    > I've been using a custom bootable CD for a while to install a
    > customized build of FreeBSD on servers, but now I have a unit that has
    > neither a CD-ROM drive nor any molex connectors at all. It does have
    > a pair of compact flash drives though. So, what I'd like to do is
    > transfer the data from my bootable CDs to a compact flash card, so I
    > can install off that instead.

    In prior employment we shipped a bunch of "embedded servers" with
    FreeBSD on CF using Soekris hardware. What I suggest you do is rather
    than duplicate your *install* CD on CF, simply use another machine to
    install the desired image directly on the CF. Probably a good place to
    use "dangerously dedicated" rather than a traditional MSDOS partition
    table.

    FreeBSD ain't no write-only Microsoft Windows. The installed image is
    robust and flexible so its easy to move one runnable image around from
    one machine to the next.

    CF media has a limited number of writes before the hidden magic built
    into the media card starts replacing worn out blocks with spares.
    Probably not a good idea to have a swap partition on your CF. Also add
    "noatime" to your filesystems in /etc/fstab and do whatever you can to
    minimize writing to CF. 

    -- 
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@HiWAAY.net
========================================================================
Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.
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