24 Sep
2008
24 Sep
'08
6:56 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
I've toyed with the idea of setting up a Linux box with a decent-size
(512M) hunk of RAM,turning off swap and using it as a network
mailserver with CF instead of IDE disk to conserve power. I'm not
sure how long the CF would last. Assuming, say, 1000 emails
(including spam) a day worst-case, I might see one fail in less than
a year, depending upon where the writes landed. Leveling would help,
of course, but do CF cards auto-level, or does that responsibility
fall upon the system using them?
I can vouch for the fact that running a normal OS on CF will kill the
card in a hurry, even without swap.
However, if you look at such distributions as Bering uClibC Linux and
some of the DIY Live CDs, a box with 512MB or even 256MB can run with
the active filesystems on ramdisk, resulting in few or even no disk
writes. I ran Bering on a Soekris net4801 for over 2 years as my home
firewall and DNS/DHCP server on a cheapo 64MB CF card.
Given 512MB RAM, you could reasonably mount even your mail directory
as a ramdisk, and write it out a few times a day. Or mount a remote
directory off a box that has to have a spinning disk.
Having said all that, good, medium capacity, low-amp 4200rpm 2.5"
drives are down to $10-20, and if you design your OS with care, they
don't take a lot of power. In Linux or *bsd, just mounting filesystems
with the noatime option will cut the power consumption by an impressive
margin. Linux, in particular, is perfectly happy with no swap, as long
as there's sufficient memory, and "sufficient" can be a surprisingly
small amount.
Doc