Name: ZOBEX Date: March 18, 2002 at 01:30:31 Pacific Subject: Zero Hard Drive Web Server
Comment:
Well the one sure way to prevent hackers from trashing your hard drive is to totally eliminate it from the server.
This weekend we picked up a box computer from a garage sale. IWill MB with 400mhz AMD and 384mb ram, cdrom but no hard drive. In went a spare drive and we set up the system on DR Dos 7 with two ram drives, one of 250MB and the other of the balance of say 120mb. Set up to boot from floppy and support both a cdrom and a temp hard drive. Installed 3.11 WFWG and a web server program into the 120mb ram drive. Once working we copied it all to the temporary hard drive. Next we burnt a booting cd rom with directories of the working ram drives so that upon boot up it creates the ram drives and copies the working files to the ram drives and then takes off running 3.11 and the web server program. The web pages were prebuilt and moved upon bootup into the 250mb ram drive. The temporary hard drive was removed before finally assembly. The system can now boot from floppy or from cdrom as the MB supports boot sequence that allows boot from cdrom. With a 40x drive it loads fast. Once installed if anyone hacks the system all we have to do is hit the reset button and it reloads itself from the cdrom. No possible hacking to the original drive. To change files on the web page is easy. We have two copies of the same read rewriteable cd and just change the files for the 250mb ram drive, switch around platters. The only moving parts are the fans and this sucker is FAST !!! Right now is running on a cross over cable till the cable tv connection is set right. Still test bench. Would like to hear any comments or suggestions ??
We're not running any swap file for that is needed with the HARD drive to speed up IO's. With a ram drive you can't get much faster. This MB has a 100mhz buss so getting things out of memory is fast.
It is running the Xitami BC3224d7, Thanks to Ken.
This is just an experiment. What is our next HACK project ??
We will next try to run full WIN95B out of full ram drives !!!!!!!