Logging to a RAM drive instead of hard disk

Hi everyone,

I am in the process of customising a NAT router/proxy server to run
completely silently after it has booted up from disk. The disk has been set
to spin down after a certain period of time.

There appear to be two programs that result in disk writes, and hence the
need to spin the disk up. Unfortunately dhclient and dhcpd (DHCP
client/server) have a bit of writing to syslog whenever a lease is renewed.

My aim is to prevent these files from being written to disk, at least for
weeks at a time, and possibly not at all. What would be the best way to do
this? I don't mind if the lease lease files to be cleared every time the
machine reboots, or if the status of each DHCP lease is not recorded
anywhere.

I have considered creating a RAM drive for both dhcpd and dhclient, and
running these two programs entirely from the RAM drive. This would give me
the advantage of being able to check the contents of these log files.

Suggestions are welcome.

On Mon, 15 Jan 2007 16:07:38 +1100, C3 wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I am in the process of customising a NAT router/proxy server to run
> completely silently after it has booted up from disk. The disk has been set
> to spin down after a certain period of time.

> I have considered creating a RAM drive for both dhcpd and dhclient, and
> running these two programs entirely from the RAM drive. This would give me
> the advantage of being able to check the contents of these log files.

Depending how much space you need it may be possible to fit the
entire thing into an initrd, so that the hard disc is only used
while booting and after that the whole system runs from RAM,
without being aware that there's a HD in the machine at all. It
should be possible to spin down the HD with a hdparm command
after it's finished booting.

If you can get that to work you could even consider booting it
from a pen drive and removing the HD completely for a system that's
silent even while it boots.

Mike