Cyclades AlterPath ACS, Command Reference Manual

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AlterPath ACS Command Reference Guide
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PCMCIA Cards Integration
7.3 Media Cards
Media cards (compact flash, hard drives) are small memory cards with a capacity up to
5 Gigabytes. They can be used like a normal hard disk drive using IDE. Using an adapter,
CF cards can be used in PCMCIA slots. Such an adapter is very cheap, because the
PCMCIA and CF card standard are the same, only the pin layout and the socket is
different. On the market, there are also small PCMCIA hard drives available, eg. a drive
from Toshiba with a capacity of 5GB (Toshiba MK5002MPL). CF card support can be
used in the ACS for storing files. This would be especially useful for example to save
the configuration. CF cards cannot be rewritten indefinitely. For this reason, CF should
not be used for logging.
For data buffering, a PCMCIA hard drive is ideal:
•
data will not be lost on power loss / crash / reboot of the CAS.
•
no dependency on an NFS server that may fail.
How it works
When inserting an adapter with a CF card or a PCMCIA hard drive, an ide device
appears. This can be mounted, eg. by:
# mkdir /mnt/ide
# mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/ide
Apart from the ext2 filesystem, the VFAT filesystem will be supported. This makes it
easy to exchange data with a Windows system. To create a vfat filesystem, the it is
possible to run the utility
mkdosfs .
To initialize a card with VFAT, do:
# echo ",,0x0e" | sfdisk /dev/hda
# mkdosfs /dev/hda1
for ext2 filesystem, do:
# echo ",,L" | sfdisk /dev/hda
The " mke2fs " utility, is the system creator for ext2 filesystems, and can be run like the
following example:
# mke2fs /dev/hda1
In addition, an utility to create or partition the CF has been added. For this, the program
sfdisk will be used. sfdisk can be easily used for scripting, so it can be called from the
prompt shell.
To check an ext2 or vfat filesystem, the utility fsck has been added.