[asterisk-users] Re: On Topic: Cheapest Asterisk USB Key?

[Gordon Henderson]

On Mon, 2 Apr 2007, Matthew Rubenstein wrote:

> 	But I'm not talking about using the Flash as RAM, just using it for a
> low-load persistent store like a HD, where a HD would be overkill in
> every way.

I boot my systems off a flash IDE drive. There's a partition with just 
enough of a root filesystem to make lilo work, a /boot directory with a 
kernel image and memtest and an initrd.gz which is a compressed ext2 
filesystem...

It is uncompressed into RAM and then the system runs entirely from RAM. 
There is a small 2nd partition on the device which I keep a tar-file of 
configuration settings. This us untarred once the system boots and fills 
in things like /etc/asterisk, /var/www/docs and a few other config files, 
including /var/spool/asterisk/astdb.

I have a 2nd flash IDE drive for voicemail. This is mouinted as a live 
filesystem and I use GSM only to store voicemail (so a 64MB device is 
going to give me many hours of VM storage).

Seems to work for me and keeps writes back to the important flash device 
(the boot one) to a bare minimum... I force fsck on the voicemail device 
at boot time, if there are any errors and I'm working on a 'sanitiser' 
too, which will remove any broken files - so it'll make sure there is a 
.WAV file for every .txt file and so on. I figure losing the occasional 
voicemail might be acceptable after someone pulls the plug on it. (and my 
experiences of this have been good in that I've nver yet lost a file)

Gordon