[Novalug] Mini-case / Diskless case recommendations

[Ed T. Toton III]

Thus spake Mark Smith:

> it really is a wonder.  i had a mini-tower running linux doing all of 
> this before.  it was probably better for some definition of better, but 
> this has the appliance flavor which is pretty neat.  no noise, just 
> blinking lights and a wap to boot.


My firewall/router box is still running on regular ATX hardware, but I 
treat it like an appliance. It's a 2U enclosure with a 400MHz celeron, and 
I'm using a CF/IDE adapter for a flash disk. I don't know the exact power 
consumption, but based on what my UPS has been reporting, I estimate the 
continuous draw to be < 60W.

Flash does of course have the degredation issues that people are 
discussing in this thread, but since my box does little in the way of 
writes, I'm not too concerned (and reads don't wear out the flash). 
Logging is done remotely, and I didn't configure any swap.

But there are some tricks you can use to mitigate the wear and tear 
anyway. For instance, mount your partitions with the 'noatime' flag so 
that you're not doing unecessary additional writes every time a file is 
read. Arguably, this might be worth doing even if you're not using flash.

Also, linux has a flash-mode for disk operations that is intended for this 
purpose. I have a flag in LILO on my box for this:

 	append="nousb hda=flash"

As an aside, iptables is very powerful, so it's worth taking the time to 
learn. There are some good firewall packages out there that work out of 
the box just fine, but it's really not hard to learn iptables itself and 
customize it the way you want. Personally I feel like I've only scratched 
the surface of it myself, and I've written some elaborate rulesets. :)


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- Ed T. Toton III - RHCE --|-- www.necrobones.com - ed.toton.org -
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