[techtalk] hdparm and DMA "not permitted"

[Penguina]

On Wed, 23 May 2001, Conor Daly wrote:

> On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 11:36:23AM +1200 or so it is rumoured hereabouts,
> Penguina thought:
> >
> > WOW THANKS!
> >
> > I just recompiled my 2.4.0 kernel with generic dma support
> > for the IDE driver on my laptop, and it more than quadrupled my
> > disk reads.  (We'll see how it handles disk *writes* from my DV
> > camera now...)
> >
> > Thanks again!
> >
> > Cheryl
>
> Sure thing, glad to help.  Now I just gotta go install 2.4 in place of the
> 2.2.16 that's currently running.  RH7.1 time?
>
> Conor

You might give SuSE 7.1 a whirl...cheaper and imho more complete.  The
pro distribution has thousands of packages (notably Zope, Squid, Python
and Postgresql) and is far cheaper than the personal version of RH 7.x
(if you want to be the first kid on your block to own the new dist and
don't have the bandwidth to download it in a reasonable amount of time).

(I had to go to 2.4 because the PCMCIA/CardBus support is a lot better,
particularly when plugging weird data acquisition devices into it. I was
very leery of doing *anything* with a 0 patch kernel...but I haven't had
any problems with it.)

For a firewall/server, a 'minimal' install and running hardsuse, then
applying the patches and tweaking the various configurations is a fairly
reasonable way to go (and even if it's for home use,  security is impt--
you really don't want some kiddie using your home machine as a
waystation for illegal activities, since it could be your door the
cops show up at first!)

I'd avoid some of the SuSE configuration scripts and default configs.
Apache is configured to run as a SuSE help server in a way that is
extremely insecure by default, and sendmail configuration is a lot
easier from the MH macros that come with the latest from sendmail.org

Cheryl