Jeni's Musings

If you have a couple of persistant loggers like Samba and NTP that you really can’t do without, a technique that can work is the use of a ram disk:

http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/Ramdisk/ramdisk.html

To prevent e.g. Samba waking the hardisk, which (from the script above) is writing to the /var/cache/samba directory, do something like:

mkdir /mnt/rd mount /mnt/rd /dev/ram0 cp -r /var/cache/samba/* /mnt/rd umount /mnt/rd mount /dev/ram0 /var/cache/samba

(or tmpfs as an alternative: mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /mnt/tmpfs -o size=10M )

Then, Samba is just writing to a ram drive and will not wake that hard drive.

This is still experimental for me, and maybe somebody with more knowledge will know some good reasons to not do this so take it with a pinch of salt…..

Daniel