oops. That's no longer true, you can now install Just Fine with no swap
partition. It was true some time back, but that was fixed long ago.
none. If swapping is a concern, you don't want flash.
naw. Unless you know what to do with a core dump, just skip the swap.
>
If you gotta ask, it won't matter.
You have three bad NICs (vr, rl, xl) and one good one (fxp). But it
just won't matter for your use.
You got yourself a little economy car of a computer system. You got it
because it is small and cheap to operate, and you will be operating it
in rush-hour. Don't worry about which tail fin will give you the "best"
performance. (no idea how well that analogy "travels" around the world.
Around here, people like buying tiny cars, then putting a loud muffler
and a huge fin (on the back of a front-wheel drive car. That so helps)
on 'em and think themselves cool, rather than the dumb-as-a-rock that
the rest of us think of them as. I really hope the rest of the world
isn't this dumb, but I fear it may be)
Philosophically, I'd probably rather put Intel card showing to the
Internet, but to fight that urge, I ran my primary mail/web server with
an rl(4) card facing the 'net for many years with zero problem.
Anything you are going to run through this box will not hit the NICs as
a bottleneck.
biggest reason to avoid writing to flash is it is painfully slow.
General experience (inc. mine) seems to indicate that the finite write
cycle problems of flash is not going to bite you. It's a blooming
computer system, how long do you even want it to last? :) In two years,
you will be buying 32G flash devices at the drugstore closeout pile.
The (then big) 256M CF that I had running OpenBSD for many years on is
now useless to me for almost anything. I don't care if it fails now.
Keep your system simple and it will run far better and longer than it
will if you trick it out to make it "better". If it DOES fail, it will
be faster to repair.
That being said, I'm not sold on the idea of flash as the "fail-proof"
storage media, I've seen and heard too many "my flash card died!"
stories to believe that. My concern is much more about the 16 billion+
storage cells in the thing and the likelihood that one or two of those
cells might have a flaw that causes them to lose their data long before
the ten-year or whatever rated life. Back up at least your config, the
critical files you need to rebuild it will take only a tiny amount of space.
(thanks for the dmesg!)
Nick.
