For my first High Availability project, I'm using HP t5135s, powered by debian on USB drives. I chose the Corsair 1GB USB drive and installed Debian on it using the guided partitioning method, 1 partition, and no root account. The choice of using no root account has proven problematic, because the system clocks are set to 2003, and "sudo su" produces an error. Not a big deal, but annoying nonetheless. To work around this, I booted into single user mode, set the system clock, then set the hardware clock to the system clock and rebooted into normal mode. Upon reboot, sudo su worked fine. :-)
I've also updated /etc/fstab to include the following:
tmpfs /etc/network/run tmpfs defaults,noatime 0 0 tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime 0 0 tmpfs /var/lock tmpfs defaults,noatime 0 0 tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults,noatime 0 0 tmpfs /var/run tmpfs defaults,noatime 0 0 tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime 0 0
Thanks to: http://feraga.com/node/30