Mother board compatibility and CF card usage as main storage device for small DNS server

[Kaya Saman]

Many thanks for the responses!


On 01/10/2010 02:52, Paul Wootton wrote:
>  On 09/30/10 14:54, Kaya Saman wrote:
>> On 30/09/2010 17:54, Brent Bloxam wrote:
>>> Kaya Saman wrote:
>>>>  From what you mention it sounds like a bad idea as the system disk 
>>>> will have many R/W's going through it it seems as /tmp and Swap get 
>>>> written to all the time.
>>>>
>>>
>>> You can skip swap altogether and use MFS (memory filesystem) like 
>>> Brian mentioned for other high write partitions that don't need to 
>>> be persistent (/tmp, /var/log). See the following article on the 
>>> freebsd.org website about using solid state storage: 
>>> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/solid-state/article.html
>>>
>>> Keep in mind though that Brian's setup was for slave nameservers 
>>> that would be caching from another master. If your nameserver is 
>>> acting as master, you'll be storing your records on flash since you 
>>> need persistent storage, but I don't imagine those files will be 
>>> write intensive.
>>>
>>> Also, if you make /var/log MFS, you'll want to have an external 
>>> syslog server set up ;)
>>
>> Thanks a lot so it should be ok then! :-)
>>
>> Yeah sounds like a good setup, and also a syslog server :-)))) this 
>> is exactly what I need in order to check my IOS logs coming from my 
>> Cisco boxes. I had previously imagined it to be a simple tftpboot 
>> server but sounds like it's standalone.
>>
>> That's cool! I mean I really like having logwatch mailing me all 
>> necessary information anyway so that coupled with a syslog server 
>> should be pretty good :-)
>>
>> Nice ideas need to do some Google'ing now as I don't know what MFS is 
>> yet but I will.... :-D
>>
>> Cheers and best regards,
>>
>>
>> Kaya
>
> I have been using a Soekris Net5501-70 box since June 2008 with a CF 
> card running FreeBSD 7.
>
> This is being used for DNS, DHCP, NNTP, network firewall and a small 
> asterisk server
>
> I have turned off writing messages to logs, and in June this year, I 
> started using an MD for /var/db/dhcpd (as that was getting written to 
> a fair amount)
> Im still on my original CF card, and as of yet, have not seen any 
> problems (touch wood)...
>
> Its not the fastest box in the world, but it certainly does what I 
> want it to do. Just takes a long time compiling a world and kernel
>
>
> Just another option for you...
>
> Paul

I checked out the Soekris and looks more like a firewall style design 
with multiple LAN ports and kinda a bit more then what I need!

Perhaps I'll just stick to my original SSD idea even though I'll pay a 
bit more but a 40GB Intel X.25 SSD should do the trick. - Am currently 
using this in another design for DNS where I'm using 2 BSD Jails for 
primary and secondary and is ultra fast :-)

Just a bit more expensive but that's ok I guess....


Best Regards,

Kaya