[sudo-access] front door computer disk backup

Jake jake at spaz.org
Wed Sep 19 12:46:27 PDT 2018


I notice sometimes when i log into the front door computer that the command
prompt is showing that the disk is in read-write mode.  I'm worried that if too
much activity happens to the eMMC disk of the beaglebone black that runs the
door, that we might have a disk failure.

either way I think we should have a backup of the door computers' filesystem,
maybe an image of the whole disk, that we can automatically maintain so that if
it ever gets corrupted or flooded or whatever we can easily replace it.

is anyone on this list willing to take that on?  I'm not an expert at this and
I feel like others might have an easier time with it.

also I think we should consider migrating the entire system to an SD card
instead of using the soldered-on eMMC chip on the beaglebone (which eventually
dies and ruins everythinng)

here's the disk situation:

/dev/disk/by-uuid/6b3e6ea0-eba5-402a-ae7a-ec2c7555affb on / type ext4
(6b3e6ea0-eba5-402a-ae7a-ec2c7555affb == mmcblk1p2 AKA the eMMC)
/dev/mmcblk1p1 on /boot/uboot type vfat
/dev/mmcblk0p1 on /mnt/sd_card type ext4 (this is the actual sd card)

the SDcard that's in there now is empty so it seems like someone could try
copying the system to it (whether for backup or to boot from it) but I have no
idea how to make a BBB boot from SDcard instead of built-in eMMC although i'm
sure it's no big deal...

anyway this is just a heads-up so that we make it easy to fix in case something
happens to the door system disk.  It's been extremely reliable for years but we
can't take that for granite* and it's important infrastructure.

-jake


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