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

[Paul Wootton]

  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