We have a machine at the CSL at UW-Madison that we use for erasing "crash" disks, which are removable IDE drives that students rent out for test projects in a lab.
When we get the disks back, we zero them out with dd.
To do this, we have a diskless (save the crash disk) machine that is set to PXE boot a copy of tomsrtbt ElTorito image. This works just fine. I modified the rc.custom script to automatically erase /dev/hdc, which also works fine.
At some point I'm gonna make a little script to give dd a progress indicator, but that's my own problem.
The main problem is screen blanking. I can find no way to turn it off, save recompiling the kernel after modifying source.
The "setterm" command would work, but I am unable to compile a copy that uses libc5, and copying over the needed libraries from a rh9 machine just causes Out of Memory errors during the uncompressing.
Would it be possible for somebody to either offer a better suggestion to disable screen blanking (since in our case it limits the usefulness of the machine), or provide a setterm that will work if stuck into the initrd.bz2 of the ElTorito image?
Thanks.
-stefan
-- Stefan Strandberg University of Wisconsin - Madison Computer Systems Lab [EMAIL PROTECTED]
