q: noflushd won't do -- what else?

[schnobs@babylon-kino.de]

Hello, 

[sorry if this comes over multiple times. I've tried to send this 
thrice over the past 12 hrs, but still haven't seen it on the list]

I've got a machine that ought to be capable to run it's tasks 
completely in RAM for long times (more details below). free 
usually reports 30-40MB (out of 80) not even to be used for 
buffering. Now, I thought there is a way to force the machine 
to fill it's buffers until either a) the disk's up anyway or b) it
runs out of memory. Furthermore, I thought noflushd would be 
taking care of this. 

the command used: noflushd -n15 /dev/hda 

trying to check it with -vd, I get the following:
Error: no valid timeout for /dev/hda 

Now I wonder what I'm doing wrong. Even more as the disk 
actually spins down -- quite frequently, in fact, as it comes 
back to live every couple of minutes. Thats bad, is it? 


More details and further ideas: It is a more-or-less classical 
dial-in box. It has a harddisk that from time to time is actually
needed, but most of the time (approx 22hrs a day) its sole job 
is IP maquerading and running a nameserver (BIND9 as out of 
the box, caching-only). 

ls -rt indicates that syslogd & al. are responsible for the 
frequent activity, at any rate the only files that have changed 
during the last couple of hours are to be found in /var/log. 

Now, I don't want to live without logging, but consider to move 
the logfiles into a ramdisk and have logrotate copy them onto 
the disk. But this seems to be quite an endeavour, and if 
anyone can think of an easier way, please let me know. 

cu, Schnobs