Invulnerable Frugal Install

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Invulnerable Frugal Install
started by: eeffoC

Posted by eeffoC on Jan. 16 2007,17:53

Hi!

I am wondering how to make my frugal installation as proof as possible.

Its installed on a computer wich has no mouse nor keyboard on a cf card. The only user intereaction is to turn on and off the computer with the powerbutton.

What would you do after finishing to customize DSL to change it into kind of Invulnerable mode?

The Problems I see are basically possible data corruption due to power blackouts and the limited lifetime of the cf card. Did I forget something here?

My Ideas so far are to change the bootoptions like removing "frugal" and adding "toram"; also to turn out the machine by just removing its electricity manually to get rid of the write (restore) processes on the cf card on a clean shutdown.

Id appreciate any advice on how to make the system more stable!!

Thanks in advance, Jan

Posted by eeffoC on Jan. 21 2007,23:15

I am now wondering about two questions:

1.) Wich installation performs the less read/write operations on the cf card. From my feeling its the hdd installation: since 3.2 the fastest boot and no data savings on the shutdown. What do the Pros say?

2.) A loss of electricity while the write-operation on the shutdown of a frugal installation already messed up my whole system, but a power blackout on a hdd installation only seems to have the effect of a hdd check on reboot. So is hdd installation the safest?

Thanks for every thought to this topic!

Edit: My installation has just about 3 txt files to save..

Posted by scot on Jan. 22 2007,00:09

Funny, I posted a response to this post previously, but it seems to have disappeared.

Firstly, frugal is generally considered quite flash-memory friendly. It does write on shutdown (but only what you tell it to via the ~/.filetool.lst), but other than that it doesn't write ever. That means that any spools, logfiles, web cache or other temp files just get put to ram , and (since they would be excluded from the .filetool.lst) never written to CF/hd. Of course you may not have many of these write-often programs running, so that may not be much of an issue. You don't mention what you will be running. This has considerable bearing on the question. For certain applications, you could make a read-only system, which *never* writes anything to your CF.

Secondly, CF cards are good these days, and don't wear out fast. You wouldn't like to put your web cache onto one, but frugal's write-once policy, they should last a long time.

That said, if you have any quantity of files that don't need to be constantly (re)written, you can easily have a hybrid-frugal system with a persistant home and/or opt. That way system settings and changable things get handled by the frugal backup/restore handling scripts, but your MP3's or PDF's or whatever don't get rewritten to CF anew every time you shutdown.

I don't know how much a DSL/hard drive install writes to the disk, but traditional linux systems write quite a bit (correct me if I'm wrong) to the drive. Anything logging, spooling, caching, puts things (esp to /var or some/tmp), and can add up to a lot of data getting spun out to your card. I think some form of frugal install is almost certainly best for minimizing writes to the CF drive.

Do not consider manually removing the electricity to avoid the backup process of frugal. Rather read and modify the scripts concerned to get them to do what you want. This is much safer. And like I said. If you don't need to change any settings or files in your 'backup' file. You don't even have to rewrite it. This should make for problem free recovery from power outages, since every time you are booting the same system you did the last time.

But perhaps this won't work. It all depends on what you are running.