…on Donner on Blitzen….
When running an OS off Compact Flash, it’s prudent to write as infrequently as possible to the CF card, since they tend to wear out. The usual solution is to mount / read-only and put all read-write activity in an MFS (ramdisk) and sync regularly.
For OpenBSD 4.0 on Soekris, I use Bill Maas’ script: (script , README). It’s very well done. The original /var is kept on-disk but used only on drive mount failure. Otherwise, the config copies /var to /mfsvar, and the boot-time mount command loads /mfsvar into an MFS mounted as /var. Just call “mfsmount sync” every hour or so to sync the MFS back to CF for persistence. Works like a champ.