Installation

I thought one of the primary goals of monowall was to stay really really tiny (less than 8MB) but now it has grown past that point.  I don't suppose there's any hope for anyone stuck with 8MB flash spaces?

Have you checked the price of a 250 MB CF card lately?
Do you really want to loose vital features and security updates so you can keep your old 8 MB memory card?

If the answer to the second question is Yes, then stick with an older version that will fit on your 8 MB card.

CS...

yeah, that's fair, the thing is, just about 4 months ago or so....I got monowall onto the on-board flash of a Firebox II (which was surprisingly difficult considering I didn't have half of the stuff I needed to do it right, for example, a CF card from which to work from)

I would have liked to have kept using the onboard flash, but I guess it's just not an option. =/

Do you really want to loose vital features and security updates so you can keep your old 8 MB memory card?

It is not so much that I do not want security updates, so much as there is no easy upgrade path.  I have larger Compact Flash cards lying around but the m0n0wall Handbook still says:

1.4.2. Specifications
  The m0n0wall system currently takes up less than 5 MB on a Compact
  Flash card or CD-ROM.

3.3.2. Preparing a CompactFlash or IDE Hard Disk
  Write the image to a sufficiently large CF card or disk (at least 5
  MB). Extra space on the CF card or disk is ignored; there is no
  benefit to using one larger than the image size.

From that it looks like m0n0wall will just barely not fit on a 4M card and it specificially says there is no benefit to using a larger card.  It would be nice if there was a clear upgrade path to move from a smaller card to a larger card.  It would be wonderful if there was a set of commands that I could feed to exec.php and end up with a backup image of the card.  Better yet would be a backup script that could generate a compressed image file from the running m0n0wall installation.  Maybe one that uses header() to give a backup filename with the date embedded.  The problem, as I understand it, is that the raw flash device is not available once m0n0wall has booted.

I have edited the captive portal and added new images.  If I start with a new flash I will have to upload the files again.  They seem to be persistent when I do an upgrade through the web interface.  I would also have to connect a keyboard and monitor to get 1 of the network cards working in order to upload a backup of the config file.

I do not have a working flash writer.  I have one built into my printer that physdiskwrite sees.  I used physdiskwrite and I did not get any errors but the result was not bootable.  Using what I had on hand I:
installed slackware
swapped the cd for an cf -> ide adapter
put the m0n0wall image on the cf card
removed the slackware hd and moved the adapter
m0n0wall booted fine

To upgrade to 1.3 I am planning on doing the following:
putting the cf -> ide adapter into an external hard drive enclosure
shutting down the running firewall and putting it in the external enclosure
dd the image to a file on my PC
swap the 8M flash for a 64M flash
dd the image file to the 64M card
see if the new card boots

Being able to make a backup image from my running m0n0wall install would be wonderful.  I expect that having automated backup scripts that could archive the images every so often and the configs more often could be useful if possible.  I am sure there would be a way for a built-in image creator to make the images as small as possible, while my dd backup will only work for me since I am going to a larger flash card.

On a side note, http://m0n0.ch/wall/beta.php says that 1.3b11 must be installed on 16MB or larger flash card.  I am under the impression that the same is true of 1.3b10 since it used to have such a warning.  I think that removing that warning from 1.3b10 and any other version that will not fit on the still suggested 8M flash was a mistake.  Since 1.3b7 is the suggested upgrade path, I expect that 1.3b8 was the first that would not fit on the 8M card.

1.3b8 was not the first to no longer fit on 8MB CF cards. The release announcement for 1.3b1 (12/16/2006) included this statement:

"WARNING: the generic-pc image no longer fits on 8 MB CF cards! (>= 10 MB required)"

[the generic-pc image]

1.3b8 was not the first to no longer fit on 8MB CF cards. The release announcement for 1.3b1 (12/16/2006) included this statement:

"WARNING: the generic-pc image no longer fits on 8 MB CF cards! (>= 10 MB required)"

You say it: the generic-pc image!
Linuxcat mentioned that all imagetypes no longer fits on 8MB CF cards.