fedora on a flash drive

[Florin Andrei]

Crazy idea: Say i'll install Fedora on a machine that has a Compact
Flash drive as the main drive (store the root filesystem) plus a normal
HDD for /var-like stuff. Think - it's some kind of "appliance" (note the
quotes) that's doing one thing, that has a SQL backend.
The system is headless and must run unattended.
The OS should sit on the Flash, mounted read-wite but seldom accessed in
write mode. The DB per se will be on the "real" hard-drive, along with
other write-often directories.

Why Flash? The OS must survive power crashes and other nasty events
without ever failing. If the data storage (which is on a regular HDD)
fails, the OS will simply rebuild it, but in order to do that it must
not fail itself.

Q1: Do you think it's too crazy a project to fly? :-)

Q2:
Ideally, /etc should be on the Flash, along with other config-specific
directories. Flash has a problem with being written too often, but all
configs must stay on the Flash for reasons mentioned above.
Actual question: which directories would you put on the Flash in such a
situation? (besides /etc)
Also, /etc has some files which are written to quite often. How would
you get rid of those?

Q3: Are there any filesystems that are better for Flash, in that they
"spread" the writes across multiple blocks?
Ext3 and any other journalised FSs should be avoided, right? (due to
concentrating lots of writes in the journal)

I could probably use Knoppix or something like that, but i'm so much
more familiar with Fedora.

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/