screen blanking/setterm

Hi,

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]