[lug] writeable CD curiosity

[The Matt]

On Wed, 2004-02-11 at 16:39, D. Stimits wrote:
> David Anselmi wrote:
> >
> > If you're going to write to the CD-RW as though it were a hard drive,
> > why not use a hard drive?  What you describe seems to add nothing but
> > poor performance and (relatively) short media life.
> >
> > OTOH, if you log to a ramdisk it would be easy to hook cdrecord into
> > your logrotate jobs so that current logs are kept on disk and old logs
> > on CD.  Then use CD-R instead of CD-RW and they won't be erasable.
> >
> > But do you really want to lose the most recent X minutes of logs when
> > your machine crashes?
> 
> Nope, this is more curiosity. But the point is to have something like a 
> ring buffer of logs on CD, so that the last 650 MB or so of logs are 
> always preserved, and if needed, a cheap CD-RW is just ejected and a new 
> one added. Ideally it would not keep writing over it again and again, 
> but if something were suspicious, one could pop the logs out and put in 
> a new CD without stopping to pause or reboot or umount/mount the 
> /var/log/ directory. A preserved CD is far more reliable than say a box 
> of 100 hard drives.
> 
> The other thing is a goal to remove all hard drives for reliability 
> reasons. Writing to a RAID system of CD-RW mirrored to a ram partition 
> means the ability to pop out bad media or media at any snapshot in time, 
> to browse or possibly rebuild conditions at the moment of the CD-RW 
> being ejected. Again, part if this is just curiosity, one of those 
> things like solving crossword puzzles that is entertaining.

For some reason, this thread reminds me of the infamous Floppy RAID:

http://ohlssonvox.8k.com/fdd_raid.htm

There is a part of me that really wants to try a 10 or 01 RAID with
floppies or Zips.  I just don't know if Linux can do software RAID of
Firewire/USB drives.  Maybe mdadm can...  And of course, I don't have
the money to buy 5 external Zip/floppy drives.

Matt

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 Matt Thompson -- http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~thompsma/
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