[time-nuts] Best OS for small time server

M. Warner Losh imp at bsdimp.com
Thu Feb 21 18:38:55 EST 2008


In message: <1963E93D-26DA-4E89-8F4B-9EF6D0B0824A at rob-vassar.com>
            Robert Vassar <rvassar at rob-vassar.com> writes:
: I successfully ran these network services sans network filesystems on  
: a 1Gb USB memory stick for about 8 months.  It was completely silent,  
: and the total power draw was roughly 5 watts.  The problem I ran into  
: is that  Linux implements a POSIX compliant filesystem.  Even taking  
: steps to eliminate swap, the never ending filesystem metadata updates  
: burned up my little flash drive in less than a year.  BSD will not  
: escape this problem.  It will be true on any system that records file  
: access/modify timestamps.  There might be a way to turn them off, or  
: you might be able to mount certain partitions read-only.

mount -o noatime will fix this on BSD.  I've deployed 32MB CF with
this in the field that have survived for 6 years now.  I did have two
partitions: the binaries were in a read only file system.  The
modified data went into a separate partition mounted -o noatime.

I thought linux also had a noatime option...

Warner



More information about the time-nuts mailing list