I am currently running brazil firewall for a router. it works very well, but it doesn't support most software and is missing things I need. it is very easy to have the installer install to the hard drive then copy everything to a ram drive and shut the hard drive down after 1 minute. this works very well. it's quiet, uses less power, and is more reliable (less chance of a hard disk failure.

I am working on a home automation project for my house. I need apache, php, mysql, and gcc in my server. I would like to run everything on the same system as the router. I usually use centos for servers and fedora core for desktops. how can I get centos to copy to a ram drive before booting like brazil firewall does?

I've been reading a lot about it, anything I can find about ram drives loading at boot, but I haven't found anything that answers all my questions. I think the easiest way would be to install a copy of centos on a hard drive and modify it to copy itself to a ram drive and boot from that. but I wouldn't know where to start or if that can even be done. brazil firewall uses syslinux boot loader. I'm not sure if it's customized at all. it extracts the files from tgz files. that's not something I need. disk space is not an issue. can any one help me with this?