USB drive on server?

[Mikkel L. Ellertson]

Timothy Murphy wrote:
> I'm thinking of using a USB flash disk in place of a hard disk
> on a rarely used server.
> 
> This seems to be widely touted as a possibility.
> But on the other hand I have been warned by several people
> that the USB drive will get exhausted quite soon.
> 
> I've been unable to find any hard figures on this.
> 
> Also, I wonder if there is any reasonably standard way
> of organising Fedora/Linux so that the "hard drive"
> is written to as little as possible,
> presumably using RAM instead.
> 
A couple of easy things to reduce writes:
- turn off atime timestamps
- send syslog to another server, instead of keeping the logs local
- send all mail to another server.
- use tmpfs for the t/tmp directory

Somewhat harder:
- create a RAMdisk and ether mount it on /var/spool, or make
/var/spool a link to directory tree on it. In ether case, create the
spool tree on bootup. Do the same for any other directories that get
written to, but you don't care about loosing the contents on a reboot.
- use a remote server for directories you need to write to.
- mount as much as you can read-only.

I am sure there are more things you can do, but this should give you
a start.

Mikkel
-- 

  Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!

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