I am trying to set up an older laptop for use as a router in my
flat. I chose this approach over a stand-alone device (such as
this
one) because I want to have fuller control over my router, such
as the ability to add a transparent caching proxy
(squid).
A main concern with setting up this machine is noise. Ideally, I
want it to be completely silent, but I do need a hard drive. Thus,
I am trying to configure the drive to spin down when not in use.
Thanks to the laptop-mode-tools package, and
syslog-ng’s caching functionality, this works like a
charm…
… until I start squid. For some reason,
squid likes to read blocks on /var every
few seconds, even if it is not being used at all. I
imagine this is some cache replacement/maintenance stuff. So now I
need to find out how to disable it, or how to control the interval.
Ideally, I would like squid to doze when it’s not in
use. Only when it serves requests is it allowed to do cache
maintenance.
If you know how I could accomplish this, please let me know!
Unfortunately, I do not have enough RAM to put my entire cache onto
a shmfs.
