Back around 2005 I was still new to Linux. I had settled into running Debian on my desktop and I needed a new project. At the time I had a crappy DLink router / access point that would get “confused” quite consistently and had to be reset. After a roommate of mine moved out and left behind an old dell Pentium III I decided to replace the DLink. I scrapped together an extra Ethernet card and a Netgear 802.11b PCI card and started messing around. Surprisingly enough, I turned an old PIII desktop into a router / wireless access point.
I can’t remember how I ran across PCEngines but their WRAP single board computer seemed like a fun and significantly more efficient replacement for my PIII access point. Installing Debian on a CF card using debootstrap was pretty straight forward. My wrap system has been routing my network traffic for 3+ years now and has required minimal / no up-keep (except for fixing my own iptables mistakes). There’s even an article on the HowTo Forge now that you can follow step-by-step.
I was always concerned however that the number of disk writes of a general purpose Linux system (pretty much everything in /var) would eventually wear out the CF card. I suppose after 3 years of operation I can say this may not be as big an issue as I first thought. Still, after purchasing another board from PC Engines I decided to install Voyage, a Debian based distro aimed at CF based embedded systems like the ALIX2d3 I’m setting up to be a VPN end point:
Installing Voyage is well documented so I won’t repeat it here. You can check out their site for the details. My general impression of Voyage so far is that it’s a bit out of date and that installing Debian directly is likely a better option. The current stable release of Voyage (version 5.2) is still based on Etch so the version of racoon is pretty old … oh yeah and I couldn’t it to boot with Grub but Lilo worked fine.
It’s not all bad though. Voyage has a really cool set-up for minimizing the number of disk writes: they symlink files that need to be writable to a tmpfs. Everything else is mounted read only. It’s also less than half the size of a minimal Debian install which in some circumstances may be important but since 2GB CF cards can be found for less than $20 this is a non-issue.
So after getting Voyage 5.2 up and running I’m going back to a minimal Lenny install using the Voyage kernel like I did on my older WRAP system … pretty much just like in the howto forge article. Maybe I’ll get fancy and mount directories under /var as a tmpfs to minimize disk writes, or even enable SELinux.
technomasochism 