Re: Running Debian Lenny from ramdisk
On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 11:43:25PM +0300, Tim Nelson wrote:
> Greetings all-
>
> I've got some questions about Lenny and running from ramdisk. Hoping someone can shed some light. ;-)
>
> <textwall>
> I have a very specific Debian Lenny based system I use for communications (think VoIP and RS232 serial). This installation is very 'pared down', only the essentials. I currently have an image that I write to new drives/systems using 'dd'. This works well, however, in some of the places I'm putting these systems, the power is horrible. After a few hundred power outages, the filesystems tend to need some TLC or are not recoverable (the underlying storage hardware, HDD or Flash device are fine).
>
> So, my thoughts are to move to an installation where the entire OS is extracted from a tar.gz or img from the storage medium and run from RAM (ala ramdisk) and the actual storage is mounted R/O or simply not mounted at all. I understand this is possible but I've yet to find any recent (read Linux 2.6.x) documentation describing the process of installing a new system as such, or converting an existing installation to this method, let alone related to Debian.
>
> Can anyone provide some pointers or instructions to get me started? I'm incredibly experienced with Linux, CentOS and Debian in particular, but I'm severely lacking in this department.
> </textwall>
>
> TLDR: How do I get Debian to run entirely from RAM?
>
Damn Small Linux (and Knoppix, I think) can do this. In Damn Small
Linux, the boot parameter is "toram", if I remember correctly. You
might want to look into those systems and see how they do it.
-Rob
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