Re: how to get a silent harddisk?

[Joachim Förster <JOFT@gmx.de>]

Hi Jacob, and all others who are interested!

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003 23:49:16 -0600 Jacob Anawalt <jacob@cachevalley.com> wrote:
[snip]
> I am interested in knowing what you learn, even though 100% diskless 
> isn't my goal, I don't want squid to keep the disk spinning when no-one 
> is accessing the proxy.
[snip]

I finally made it :-). I implemented the initial suggestion of Stefan and put everything into a chroot jail (all the necessary libs and bins/sbins). This chroot jail is on a tmpfs. The result is, that the harddisk isn't used anymore (turned off by noflushd, additionally tuned values in /proc/sys/vm/bdflush).
The daemons running in the chroot jail are: syslogd, klogd, smbd, nmbd, squid, pdnsd, dhcpd, ntpd (simple), isdnutils (isdnlog, ipppd), dlcd (my own "remote line control tool"), crond. The tmpfs is around 12M (64M RAM total) now and squid is told to use no disk cache (read-only option).
Well, in fact I don't need samba, but I believe ;-), Windows networking in performing better, when samba is installed (WINS, Local Master Browser, ... :).
Probably squid isn't necessary, too. At the moment I only use some ACL rules, fake-the-user-agent-feature and the header anonymize feature. I think there are smaller proxies? Oh, but I forgot the main reason: transparent proxying.
Sometimes I think I could "feel" a little advantage of the small RAM cache (8M max) .... Hmmm ....
I minimized logging and told crond (logrotate) to run often to control the rest.
I wrote a simple bash script which copies a prepared tmpfs (on harddisk) to the real tmpfs at startup, fetches the current conf files and starts the daemons in the chroot jail.

It's great, no more harddisk noise and all functions I need :-),
 Joachim