[talk] SD cards for Pi?

[Charles Sprickman]

Yay!

> On Nov 17, 2017, at 6:07 PM, Isaac (.ike) Levy <ike at blackskyresearch.net> wrote:
> 
> Word,
> 
> On Fri, Nov 17, 2017, at 05:51 PM, Charles Sprickman wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> I know there are a ton of ARM fans here running various Pi clones and
>> such…  I had a model B sitting around and I decided that I’d move my znc
>> proxy and ssh/tmux jumphost off of my big media server and onto the Pi. 
>> I have a UPS, and like to let the big server shutdown 10 minutes into a
>> power outage, and then just let the rest of the stuff run until the
>> battery is near death.  So the Pi looked like a nice option that would
>> take very little power.  I installed FreeBSD 11.1/ARM on there and
>> installed a few packages, all was well for about 8 months.
>> 
>> Last night, the Pi disappeared.  Today I looked at it and on checking the
>> SD card, it seemed dead. Laptop recognized it, but no partition table and
>> any attempt to dd things from or to it failed with an IO error.  
>> 
>> So two questions:
>> 
>> - At a local Walgreens or Staples, what’s a decent SD card?  I know
>> nothing of these things.
> 
> SanDisk are my common go-to, as fast as you want to pay for.
> 
> They all die, but still sometimes have probs with bootloader on no-brand
> stuff.
> (Yes, in 2017, still problems here with cheap media.)

WalMart, $12 16GB SanDisk “class 10”.  Old one was “Maxell” micro SD in
an adapter.  Maxell have apparently gone from cassette tapes to flash storage 
I guess, I do not recall this happening when I inserted it into the Pi: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBem3x7G6bc <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBem3x7G6bc>
> 
>> - Is there any tweaking I should have done to FreeBSD to make it not
>> write excessively to the card (I did not have swap enabled)?
> 
> /etc/defaults/rc.conf has a few goodies that recently surprised me, easy
> easy memdisk for tmp and var.
> Also, disable swap.
> 
> --
> tmpmfs="AUTO"           # Set to YES to always create an mfs /tmp, NO to
> never
> tmpsize="20m"           # Size of mfs /tmp if created
> tmpmfs_flags="-S"       # Extra mdmfs options for the mfs /tmp
> varmfs="AUTO"           # Set to YES to always create an mfs /var, NO to
> never
> varsize="32m"           # Size of mfs /var if created
> varmfs_flags="-S"       # Extra mount options for the mfs /var
> mfs_type="auto"         # "md", "tmpfs", "auto" to prefer tmpfs with md
> as fallback
> populate_var="AUTO"     # Set to YES to always (re)populate /var, NO to
> never

This worked but for “varmfs” - in 11.1, that seems to be either “YES” or
“NO” - no “AUTO” option.

> Next big thing: your application.  Write to a mem disk if it writes
> often.

ZNC and tmux, that’s it.

Thanks so much, that was extremely helpful.

Charles

Oh - and if you’re ever eating/drinking at NJ NYI, I’m about 20 minutes north of there.

> 
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> Charles
>> 
>> PS - Ike, I dropped the OS-X thread not out of frustration, but more like
>> it’s too long of a convo to have via email.  
> 
> Ha! Indeed.  Next time with drink in hand.
> 
> Best,
> .ike
> 
> 
>> I’ll say this though -
>> anyone still using OS-X, take a look at iTerm and the tmux integration
>> feature, it’s awesome.
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