FC4 CF-based Router

[Steven Ringwald]

Bob Chiodini wrote:

>Do you have a CF interface in your development/desktop?  If so, then why
>not just copy your small installation directly to an ext2 or ext3
>partition on the CF and grub-install grub as the boot loader?  
>
>If you don't have a CF interface on your desktop, then either get one,
>or if your target can boot a CD...  Boot up Knoppix, format the CF, copy
>your small installation to the CF over the network (SCP, NFS) then grub-
>install grub to the CF.
>
>You will most likely want to mount your root file system read-only and
>place all of your volatile data in a tmpfs file system to avoid
>shortening the life of the CF.  
>
>You can also put your entire file system in a ramdisk (initrd) and run
>the system out of RAM.  You will probably need a lot of RAM, but you
>don't have to worry about FSCK'ing the CF and it's probably faster
>without the CF I/O.
>
>CF to IDE adapters:
>
>http://mach5products.com/merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=CF
>
>We use one similar to the $19.95 version near the bottom of the page.
>

Bob,

Thanks for your response! Yes, I have a CF <-> IDE adapter in my box. 
The problem that I am having with ext2/ext3/etc is that no matter what I 
specify, the system comes up (rw) (based on what /proc/mounts and touch 
/foo show). I have the 'ro' flag on my kernel line in the grub.conf, and 
have the noatime,ro line in my fstab, but they still seem to want to 
come up rw... I have even gone so far as to wipe out /etc/mtab and 
/etc/blkid.tab*, but haven't had much luck getting it to stay read-only 
past the initrd stage.... I have gotten it to stay read-only by creating 
a read-only filesystem image (like iso9660 or cramfs), but haven't had 
much luck getting it to boot from another partition. (I basically have 
to dd the iso image to /dev/hda3 and mount that in the initrc's init 
script).

Steve