The Gate/setup

A warning note about compact flash cards

Compared to a regular hard disk, compact flash cards have a very unusual geometry. A hard disk has 63 sectors per track, and leave a 62 sectors gap between the partition table and the first partition. For a 512 bytes sector size (the norm), this is about 31 KiB of "unusable" space on the disk. Since that space is normally unused, grub install by default it's core image in that gap area that is called the embedding space.

Since the compact flash card installed in The Gate report 16 sectors per track, this leave a gap of 15 sectors of 512 bytes, which means 7 KiB of the same "unusable" space. Grub cannot install it's core image in that space and complain about it during boot loader (re)installation, telling you that you should use block list to make it usable. During package installation/update/upgrade, grub will silently fail and leave your machine in an unbootable state.

To avoid the shortage of that useful "unusable" space, here is how you should partition the flash card:

• Delete all partitions
• Create a new partition of size between 31 KiB and 1 MiB
• Create the partition containing your root filesystem
• Create other partitions as needed
• DELETE the first partition (this is the crutial step)
• Format all partitions and proceed as desired.
• (re)install grub as usual

A cleaner alternative would involve creating partitions in GPT format, but the gdisk tool is not packaged in Debian "Squeeze".

Root filesystem

Flashcard rootfs has been built with debootstrap

debootstrap --include=openvpn,ssh,mc,aiccu,radvd,dmidecode,wireless-tools,bzip2,less,ddclient,etherwake,linux-image-686,whois,rsync,ppp,pppoeconf,arp-scan,sudo,screen,sed,nmap,lm-sensors,bridge-utils,acpi,firmware-linux-free,pciutils,grub,console-setup,quagga,acpid,hostapd,deborphan,telnet,lsof,libapache-gallery-perl,ntpdate,cron-apt,mpd,alsa-utils,ncmpc,mpc,cryptsetup,cryptmount,pwgen,tcpdump,dma,rkhunter,rssh,sipcalc,genisoimage,wide-dhcpv6-server,bind9,tftpd-hpa squeeze /mnt/usb

/etc/fstab:

/dev/sda1       /               auto            noatime,errors=remount-ro       1       1
proc            /proc           proc            defaults                        0       0
/tmp            /tmp            tmpfs           nosuid,nodev                    0       0
aptarchives     /var/cache/apt/archives tmpfs   nosuid,nodev,noexec             0       0

/dev/mapper/cswap       none            swap            sw                              0       0
/dev/mapper/srv       /srv            auto            nosuid,nodev,noexec               1       2