CentOS - Jul 2011 - Experience with Centos running off usb-stick(s)

Hi,
I'm trying to build a redundant duo of firewalls/routers/gateways and
I'm
thinking about not putting any disks in them and instead using a usb-stick 
raid-1 as storage.
Has anyone any experience with this? Since the machines will be running 
pretty much only iptables, conntrackd and keepalived there is not going to 
be a lot of disk activity going on and the plan is to do all the logging on 
a remote machine which should reduce the write activity on the sticks to 
almost zero during normal operation.

I've already created a fairly minimal kickstart for such an installation 
but I'm wondering if there are any opinions out there on whether this is a 
feasible approach or if there are any gotchas I'm not aware of.

Regards,
   Dennis

On Jul 21, 2011 8:27 AM, "Dennis Jacobfeuerborn" <dennisml at
conversis.de>
wrote:
>
> Hi,
> I'm trying to build a redundant duo of firewalls/routers/gateways and
I'm
> thinking about not putting any disks in them and instead using a usb-stick
> raid-1 as storage.
> Has anyone any experience with this?
I simply wouldn't build a system that is dependent on USB for the rootfs
full-time, unless it's very unimportant.  I've seen USB ports get
disabled
while in-use plenty of times.  Instead, an ATA to CF or SD adapter can be
had quite inexpensively.
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On Thursday, July 21, 2011 05:26:47 PM Dennis Jacobfeuerborn
wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm trying to build a redundant duo of firewalls/routers/gateways and
I'm
> thinking about not putting any disks in them and instead using a usb-stick
> raid-1 as storage.
> Has anyone any experience with this? Since the machines will be running
> pretty much only iptables, conntrackd and keepalived there is not going to
> be a lot of disk activity going on and the plan is to do all the logging on
> a remote machine which should reduce the write activity on the sticks to
> almost zero during normal operation.
> 
> I've already created a fairly minimal kickstart for such an
installation
> but I'm wondering if there are any opinions out there on whether this
is a
> feasible approach or if there are any gotchas I'm not aware of.
I/we have done this on a few systems with vanilla CentOS and no problems. Do 
note however that not all usb-sticks are the same (performance can vary _a 
lot_).

/Peter
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cooleyr at gmail.com wrote:
> On Jul 21, 2011 8:27 AM, "Dennis Jacobfeuerborn" <dennisml at
conversis.de
> <mailto:dennisml at conversis.de>> wrote:
>  >
>  > Hi,
>  > I'm trying to build a redundant duo of firewalls/routers/gateways
and I'm
>  > thinking about not putting any disks in them and instead using a 
> usb-stick
>  > raid-1 as storage.
>  > Has anyone any experience with this?
> 
> I simply wouldn't build a system that is dependent on USB for the
rootfs
> full-time, unless it's very unimportant.  I've seen USB ports get 
> disabled while in-use plenty of times.  Instead, an ATA to CF or SD 
> adapter can be had quite inexpensively.
> 
There are DOM's, IDE Disk-On-Module.

-- 

Ljubomir Ljubojevic
(Love is in the Air)
PL Computers
Serbia, Europe

Google is the Mother, Google is the Father, and traceroute is your
trusty Spiderman...
StarOS, Mikrotik and CentOS/RHEL/Linux consultant