[geeks] IPCop and pfSense...

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Fri, 2008-04-18 at 15:30 -0400, nate at portents.com wrote:
> Yeah, I've been thinking about that, and it's probably a good idea in
> general with flash media to minimize writes (turn off swap, and log to
> RAM
> then dump to flash at reboot/shutdown).  I know modern flash with
> level-wearing is a lot better, but it will still wear out.

I run my systems at work (and where ever they end up) with no swap, / is
mounted noatime, and /var is a symlink to /tmp/var, but syslogd is
turned off anyway.

However, I don't know that I would recommend putting the log files in a
ramdisk for a server appliance.  I am working with several assumptions
and limitations that you probably aren't working with.  

First, I want to do my best to design a system that will take years of
uptime and it shouldn't wear out in 5-10 years if at all possible.
Second, I have some moderate semi-realtime requirements and cron running
log-rotate to keep the logs to a sensible size in the RAM disk was
causing problems.  Further, I don't need the logs for security reasons,
only for system diagnostics, so if a system starts acting up, I can just
have a serial logger attached to it.  Also, I haven't had the time to
make the system read only (I will need a seperate RW partition since I
save system settings to the flash, and I haven't made the needed
adjustments to do that.).

If I was designing a flash booting NAS appliance, I would look into
putting the logs (but not any of the OS) onto the data drives.