In this way, you run a much higher risk losing (the recently written) data during a power loss, but just add a UPS with comms and you can save and shutdown cleanly, then no problems at all!

If you want to get a little bit more fancy (and have sufficient RAM), you can mount most of the /var stuff on a RAM drive (during boot up using simple tmpfs entries in mtab), and you can probably reduce the number of archive copies of each log file (see the cron logrotate configs) just to save precious CF space…

I’ll admit that I only have about a year’s worth of run time on the dozen or so machines that I set up this way, however the first experiment (close eyes and pretend it’s magnetic media) failed reliably within a month!

Ok… Found a typo in your posting. The lines for the fstab:

“tmpfs /var/lib/nfs tmpfs 0 0″
Should be:
“tmpfs /var/lib/nfs tmpfs default 0 0″

Then I wonder if the “proc /proc proc defaults 0 0″ really is necessary, since the “/proc” is already made into tmpfs by default(?). You probably know that better than me.

The mtab solution gives an “fail” message during boot process:

rm /etc/mtab
ln -s /proc/mounts /etc/mtab

But it looks like everything is still okay. The “/proc/mounts” do have a little bit more lines and information than the regular “/etc/mtab” got. Maybe the fail message can be ignored without any worries.

The madoka -file for my setup looks like this:

——————————————————
#!/bin/sh
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: madoka
# Required-Start: $local_fs
# Required-Stop: $local_fs
# Default-Start: 2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop: 1
# X-Start-Before: bootlogs sysklogd
# Short-Description: recreate /var/log structure for Madoka
# Description: recreate /var/log structure for Madoka
### END INIT INFO

do_start () {
# mkdir -p /var/log/mldonkey
mkdir -p /var/log/apache2
touch \
/var/log/apache2/access.log \
/var/log/apache2/error.log \
/var/log/apache2/other_vhosts_access.log
chown root:adm \
/var/log/apache2 \
/var/log/apache2/access.log \
/var/log/apache2/error.log
chmod 710 /var/log/apache2
chmod 640 \
/var/log/apache2/access.log \
/var/log/apache2/error.log
chmod 644 /var/log/apache2/other_vhosts_access.log

mkdir -p /var/log/apparmor
chmod 755 /var/log/apparmor

mkdir -p /var/log/apt
touch /var/log/apt/term.log
chmod 755 /var/log/apt
chmod 600 /var/log/apt/term.log

mkdir -p /var/log/ConsoleKit
touch /var/log/ConsoleKit/history
chmod 755 /var/log/ConsoleKit
chmod 644 /var/log/ConsoleKit/history

mkdir -p /var/log/dist-upgrade
chmod 755 /var/log/dist-upgrade

mkdir -p /var/log/fsck
touch \
/var/log/fsck/checkfs \
/var/log/fsck/checkroot
chown root:adm \
/var/log/fsck/checkfs \
/var/log/fsck/checkroot
chmod 755 /var/log/fsck
chmod 640 \
/var/log/fsck/checkfs \
/var/log/fsck/checkroot

mkdir -p /var/log/installer
chmod 755 /var/log/installer

mkdir -p /var/log/landscape
touch /var/log/landscape/sysinfo.log
chown landscape:root \
/var/log/landscape \
/var/log/landscape/sysinfo.log
chmod 755 /var/log/landscape
chmod 644 /var/log/landscape/sysinfo.log

mkdir -p /var/log/mysql
chown mysql:adm /var/log/mysql
chmod 2750 /var/log/mysql

mkdir -p /var/log/news
touch \
/var/log/news/news.crit \
/var/log/news/news.err \
/var/log/news/news.notice
chown news:news /var/log/news
chown syslog:adm \
/var/log/news/news.crit \
/var/log/news/news.err \
/var/log/news/news.notice
chmod 2755 /var/log/news
chmod 640 \
/var/log/news/news.crit \
/var/log/news/news.err \
/var/log/news/news.notice

mkdir -p \
/var/log/samba \
/var/log/samba/cores \
/var/log/samba/cores/nmbd \
/var/log/samba/cores/smbd \
/var/log/samba/cores/winbindd
chown root:adm /var/log/news
chmod 750 /var/log/news
chmod 700 \
/var/log/samba/cores/nmbd \
/var/log/samba/cores/smbd \
/var/log/samba/cores/winbindd

touch \
/var/log/auth.log \
/var/log/boot \
/var/log/btmp \
/var/log/daemon.log \
/var/log/debug \
/var/log/dmesg \
/var/log/dpkg.log \
/var/log/faillog \
/var/log/kern.log \
/var/log/lastlog \
/var/log/lpr.log \
/var/log/mail.err \
/var/log/mail.info \
/var/log/mail.log \
/var/log/mail.warn \
/var/log/messages \
/var/log/mysql.err \
/var/log/mysql.log \
/var/log/pycentral.log \
/var/log/syslog \
/var/log/udev \
/var/log/user.log \
/var/log/wtmp

chown syslog:adm \
/var/log/auth.log \
/var/log/daemon.log \
/var/log/debug \
/var/log/kern.log \
/var/log/lpr.log \
/var/log/mail.err \
/var/log/mail.info \
/var/log/mail.log \
/var/log/mail.warn \
/var/log/messages \
/var/log/syslog \
/var/log/user.log

chown root:utmp \
/var/log/btmp \
/var/log/lastlog \
/var/log/wtmp

chown root:adm \
/var/log/boot \
/var/log/dmesg \
/var/log/dpkg.log

chown mysql:adm \
/var/log/mysql.err \
/var/log/mysql.log

chown root:root \
/var/log/faillog \
/var/log/pycentral.log \
/var/log/udev

chmod 640 \
/var/log/auth.log \
/var/log/boot \
/var/log/daemon.log \
/var/log/debug \
/var/log/dmesg \
/var/log/dpkg.log \
/var/log/kern.log \
/var/log/lpr.log \
/var/log/mail.err \
/var/log/mail.info \
/var/log/mail.log \
/var/log/mail.warn \
/var/log/messages \
/var/log/mysql.err \
/var/log/mysql.log \
/var/log/syslog \
/var/log/user.log

chmod 664 \
/var/log/btmp \
/var/log/lastlog \
/var/log/wtmp

chmod 644 \
/var/log/faillog \
/var/log/pycentral.log \
/var/log/udev
}

case “$1″ in
start)
do_start
;;
restart|reload|force-reload)
echo “Error: argument ‘$1′ not supported” >&2
exit 3
;;
stop)
# No-op
;;
*)
echo “Usage: $0 start|stop” >&2
exit 3
;;
esac
——————————————————

I’m afraid I was a bit sloppy when I took the notes to write this ;-)
Hopefully I’ll do a better job when I write about the Live-system installation. I’m currently installing this same setup in under 200MB, so I’ve got another 50-60 to save updates in my 256MB card.
I just need to make some free time to document the process, though.

Let me know if you find any more errors.

I’m trying to apply this on a pure Jauntu Server installation. All seems to work except the script (madoka) that is supposed to re-create the environment inside the ‘/var/log directory’.

First,
Running ‘update-rc.d madoka start 05 2′ gives an error back, complaining about a missing “.” at the end of the arguments.
I think I’ve solved it by running “update-rc.d madoka start 05 2 .” instead.

Second,
The script doesn’t run at boot, making the log file daemon complaining on missing files and folders.

I have not tried to apply the post on a Jauntu Desktop, since this is not my goal. So, how can the script execution be solved?

Sincerely,
Peter

From the reading I have done on the swap partition it does not get used unless you run out of RAM, as I have 2GB this is fairly unlikely depending on what I get up to of course. So far my monitoring has shown 0 swap usage.

I have followed your advice on moving the log files to tmpfs, I did consider disabling these completely but decided that for debug they would be useful. I have also moved my browser cache to tmp which is in tmpfs.

So far everything is running great with a full Ubuntu install on the 8gb card, still have 3.3gb free on the card though with the Amazon S3 it is really unlimited.

I will give it a few weeks and maybe splash out on a 300x CF card, the card make is SILICON POWER from Taiwan.

Ravi: Assuming your CF /dev/sda1 is mounted under /mnt/cf, something like this should do:

grub-install /mnt/cf –recheck /dev/sda

This will install the bootloader, which you’ll have to configure. Enter a chroot environment on your cf card and use update-grub

If you need more details, you could check out this post. There’s a script that will show you every step needed: http://blog.quinthar.com/2008/07/building-1gb-bootable-qemu-image-using.html

I set up my Acer laptop a couple of days back using a IDE CF card adapter I purchased form Hong Kong for £1.99 GBP and an 8GB x200 CF card for £18.86 GBP. I installed the latest Ubuntu 9.04 – Jaunty.
For file storage I am using Amazon S3 and jungleDisk mapping my storage as drives on my laptop so basically I have unlimited storage. This works grate for Documents which now point to my S3 storage and I also have a separate storage area for Photo’s.

The system runs quit fast and boots a lot quicker, my original Laptop HD was a 100gb 7200rpm drive so quite quick.

I have as yet not turned off my swap file or moved any log files to tempfs.

chris@chris-laptop:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 888 MB in 2.00 seconds = 443.59 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 80 MB in 3.00 seconds = 26.65 MB/sec

Can any one tell me how to install grub on compact flash

I’m using kernel 2.26.8