| 1 |
Hello, |
| 2 |
|
| 3 |
Background: |
| 4 |
I've been on a journey to migrate many servers (firewalls and dns) |
| 5 |
to Compact Flash (CF) drives to improve reliability, ease in new |
| 6 |
installation, ease replacing hard drivers that fail, duplicating |
| 7 |
drives that fail and cloning servers with a simple, straightforward |
| 8 |
methodology. |
| 9 |
|
| 10 |
This is the CF method, later on I'll do a USB page, but, lots |
| 11 |
of older hardware will not boot off of usb, but if somebody wants |
| 12 |
to write to me a methodology for usb sticks, that would be cool. |
| 13 |
|
| 14 |
I'm not exactly the quintessential sys-admin, so as I outline |
| 15 |
my ideas and issues, please feel encouraged to help me make the |
| 16 |
efforts better. Hopefully, it will result in a wiki that everyone |
| 17 |
can use. |
| 18 |
|
| 19 |
|
| 20 |
Issue 1. Cost containment. |
| 21 |
Right now, I'm using 4GB Sandisk CF cards in vintage x86 and k5 |
| 22 |
machines without issue. I use CF-2-ide converters that are not |
| 23 |
labels, made in china. It'd be nice to be able to use some of |
| 24 |
the less expensive 4GB CF cards, but I have not tested any, and |
| 25 |
do not wish to purchase a random sample to establish confidence. |
| 26 |
Any one with low-cost CF cards that work reasonable well, just let me know. |
| 27 |
|
| 28 |
|
| 29 |
Issue 2. Ease of access. |
| 30 |
|
| 31 |
Currently, I had a bunch of old IDE chasis that are locked and come in |
| 32 |
a tray form. Once you install the tray, you can easily remove the tray |
| 33 |
from the front of the machine. The CF-2-ide converters which contain |
| 34 |
the CF cards are easily access. I do this because I have many of these |
| 35 |
old removable ide trays already. What would be better is to find |
| 36 |
pci internal slot cards that have the CF-2-ide built in and the |
| 37 |
CF cards would be accessible from the back of the machines. Any |
| 38 |
suggests for this type of hardware would been keen. |
| 39 |
|
| 40 |
Issue 3. Ease of purchase. |
| 41 |
I'd really like to find a single, low-cost supplier of the CF |
| 42 |
cards and the CF-2-ide converter hardware. Any suggestions? |
| 43 |
|
| 44 |
|
| 45 |
Issue 4. Cloning or Duplicating. |
| 46 |
As many of you know, installations can be quite time consuming, |
| 47 |
and challenging on old PCs. So what I intend to do is take |
| 48 |
and currently running machine and stream the contents to |
| 49 |
another machine with a CF burner or pull the CF card from |
| 50 |
a machine that is in good shape but shutdown and duplicate it. |
| 51 |
|
| 52 |
Two issues I see. |
| 53 |
|
| 54 |
4A. Best method to duplicate the CF card live while the system |
| 55 |
is running. |
| 56 |
|
| 57 |
DD, cpio, scp (example syntax) in a step by step)? |
| 58 |
|
| 59 |
4B. What is the minimal amount of data/files that need to be edited |
| 60 |
bot build a similar but unique machine. |
| 61 |
1. IP address (edit conf.d/net). |
| 62 |
2. Name (edit) conf.d/hostname). |
| 63 |
Anything else? |
| 64 |
|
| 65 |
|
| 66 |
James |
Archives