This software is provided "as-is" and without warranty of any kind, expressed, implied or otherwise, including and without limitation, any warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Use this software at your own risk! In no event shall the author be liable for any special, incidental, indirect or consequential damages whatsoever (including, without limitation, damages for loss of profits, business interruption, loss of information, or any other loss), whether or not advised of the possibility of damage, and on any theory of liability, arising out of or in connection with the use or inability to use this software.
Read the whole README before installing RAMCop!
RAMCop is an addon for IPCop ( http://www.ipcop.org/ ). RAMCop allows IPCop to be executed in system memory. This makes it possible to shut down the hard drive of the system. Thus the system consumes less power, generates less heat and, best of all, is (apart from the fans) silent
Sufficient system memory for RAMCop is essential. For a standard installation of IPCop without other addons at least 256 MB are necessary. In this case the lion's share of system memory is used. I recommend at least 512 MB.
The addon does not run on systems that use SCSI hard drives.
The system completely runs in the system memory like it was explained in the section "What is RAMCop". To avoid the loss of data (by e.g. a power failure) the data is periodically saved to the hard drive. This is done with a cronjob. The particular time - the time of day and the days of the week - can be adjusted vie the webgui. For the shutdown of the hard drive there are two possibilities. It can be set to spin down or to shut down completely. As an extra option the system can be saved to the harddrive at any time vie the webgui.
RAMCop adds extra entries to the grub bootloader. At every boot you can choose to run the normal system or RAMCop. Alternatively you may use an other addon called GrubGUI to do this.
Last but not least RAMCop can be used to treat flash mediums with care. You can install IPCop directly to flash memory without the necessity to use mkflash. An install to a flash medium normally wears off the medium quite fast. RAMCop reduces the damaging write accesses and thus extends the lifetime of the flash medium.
With RAMCop it is not possible to use the proxy in a reasonable way. There is in the majority of cases not enough space left in system memory. At the moment RAMCop does not check this. In worst case your system might hang due to the lack of free system memory. This might lead to the loss of data!
RAMCop does not run on systems using SCSI harddrives.
RAMCop needs to reboot the system after installation. Likewise it is necessary to reboot the system for normal (i.e. running from harddrive) operation before uninstalling RAMCop.
After downloading the addon (in the download section, it's a file like "ramcop_VERSION.tar.gz") copy it to the IPCop machine.
Unpack the archive with "tar xzf ramcop_VERSION.tar.gz".
Go to the folder: "cd ramcop_VERSION".
Install with "./install".
After a successful install the folder may be removed.
Just run the uninstaller: "/var/ipcop/ramcop/uninstall". Attention: RAMCop must not be running! In this case the uninstall skript demands a reboot to the normal system. You can simply install a new version, the old one will be uninstalled automatically (with all saved settings).
All settings are modified via the webgui. You find the webgui in the section named "Services".
You may configure the following settings:
When to save the system to harddrive: the time of day and the day can be set. The harddrive will be activated on that date and the data will be saved. The harddrive will shutdown afterwards.
Power off mode for the harddrive: You can choose whether to put the harddrive to standby or sleep mode. I'm not sure whether all harddrives support both modes. On systems running from a flash medium this choice has understandably no effect.
At last the system may immediately be saved to disk manually.
Version 0.5 - 11.03.2007
Fix: The calculation of the amount of memory needed didn't work correctly
Version 0.4 - 01.02.2007
Feature: The particular time for saving the whole system to harddisk has more settings
Feature: RAMCop calculates the amount of memory needed at startup. If there is not enough free memory, RAMCop will not be started. In this case the normal system is started
Feature: RAMCop checks the free memory periodically. Above a critical ram usage there may be sent a mail
Feature: During installation you can change te logrotate.conf. You can choose how many old log files you want to keep (low number to save memory)
Version 0.3 - 06.09.2006
Fix: RAMCop now shuts down the harddrive after booting (thanks to gaston)
Fix: The default boot entry for RAMCop was changed. Accidentally the smp-kernel was started
Version 0.2 - 04.09.2006
Fix: RAMCop now works with harddrives other than /dev/hda (e.g. harddrives on the secondary bus) (thanks to gaston)
Feature: Upon installation the bootloader can be modified to automatically start RAMCop on the next boot. After that RAMCop is the dafault boot entry (thanks to mh254)
Version 0.1 - 17.08.2006
First version