PowerBook Wall Street Server (NO SLEEP EVER)???

[Preston Wilson]

All -

I'm trying to set up a PowerBook as a server.  I know, silly idea.  But it
makes sense: low profile, built-in display, keyboard, mouse, and battery
backup.  [And besides, the tension on the screen is shot so it won't stand
up at a 90-degree angle and the battery itself is completely dead...
rendering it a less-than-desirable choice for everyday business use. ;) ]

Problem is this:

I can't seem to get the machine to reliably answer on the network.  When
I'm at the office sitting right next to it, it works just fine.  However,
when I try to SSH to it once I get home, it doesn't respond.  I can't
connect to the Web server from home either.  At first I thought that the
machine was going to sleep, but I could ping the machine with *very* low
latency.

Here's the kicker: when I SSH into another box on the office network, I'm
able to SSH into my PowerBook [with none of the delay you would expect if
this were some sort of wake-on-lan sleep mode].  What's more, as soon as
I've logged in to the PowerBook from a machine on the office network [to
which I connected with SSH from home], I'm then able to connect directly
to the PowerBook from home using SSH, HTTP, SMTP, POP, etc..

I have no firewall rules defined on the machine itself
(ipchains/iptables), and I have no rules on the office firewall that
should be restricting this sort of traffic (esp. to be restricting until a
user is logged in).

The hardware is thus: PowerBook G3 (opaque black keys, circa 1998, I
believe they call it the "Wall Street" model).

Software: YDL 2.3 (boot w/ BootX), Qmail, UW-IMAP 2002.325, Apache 2.0.39,
PHP 4.2.2.

Things I've tried based on stuff I've learned on the 'net:

o  I've set PMUD_FLAGS="-k" in /etc/sysconfig/power
o  I've created a file /etc/power/levels with the contents "1 3"
o  I'm about to try removing pmud from the startup items and
   rebooting... but I don't think that'll help (as it doesn't
   really smell like a power management issue).

I'm sure this is all just a Stupid User Trick, but as a native RedHat user
I'm relatively new to the very slightly different ways of doing things in
YDL.  Thanks in advance for any help you're able to offer...

Preston Wilson

--
[Preston Wilson, RHCE] [Linkbeat Technologies] [http://linkbeat.com/]