Re: hdparm and disk access
Forrest Humphrey wrote:
I am getting wireless Internet access from my college and I am wanting
to put Debian on an old AMD K6-2 to serve as my Internet gateway for the
rest of my computers. However, I want this box to run on as little
power as possible so my question is one from more of a hardware
perspective I guess. I will be getting Internet access via a Linksys
If you want a low-power Linux box, a linksys wrt54g is hard to beat:-)
802.11b USB device plugged into the K6-2 box. This box will also be the
firewall (using, of course, iptables for NAT and packet filtering), then
routing out through a PCI NIC. Okay, now say I've used hdparm to
specify that my 2 hard drives in the box should spin down after, say 5
minutes:
hdparm -S 60 /dev/hda
hdparm -S 60 /dev/hdb
Why not take the drives out and deploy them elsewhere?
You can run a special-purpose distro such as ipcop or guardian (the
latter is built from Debian), booting from CD.
Or, if some of the rest of your computers are running Linux, you can
boot the AMD box off the LAN and mount its filesystem from nfs, ro.
It's hard to crack a box that has a ro-filesystem, and its especially
hard to keep it cracked if it gets rebooted de temps en temps.
You could also look at pebble: I should have suggested this first, as it
can turna supported NIC into an AP.
Wireless security is basically broken, so you might consider running a
VPN (I like openvpn) between the end points and permit no other traffic.
--
Cheers
John
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