OK, I'm making headway. Enough to start worrying about the relatively
trivial stuff. :-)

I have an old laptop, a Gateway 2000 Liberty. At one time this was the
height of technology, alas, now it is sorely behind the times.

I plan on using it as a firewall, so I want to turn off the screen. I've
set

display.vblank=on # enable vertical sync blank for screen burner
display.screen_off=60000 # set screen burner timeout to 60 seconds

in /etc/wsconsctl.conf, but it doesn't have any effect. The screen stays
on and backlit.

The laptop has APM. I can use apm -s to put it to sleep, and this will
also shut down the screen, backlight and all. Unfortunately, it also
becomes unresponsive. (It is sleeping, after all.)

So... I know the screen can be blanked. I know the normal screen blanking
paramter doesn't work.

I don't care if both the screen and the keyboard are shut off and can't be
restarted. I will only access this laptop via the network, so the PCMCIA
subsystem has to stay running.

I would also like to shut down the hard drive, and redirect all of the
firewall logging out the serial port, and keep the HD shut down as much as
possible.

Any guidance? Suggestions?

Sorry for pestering the group with questions, but this is all new to me
and I'm a bit frustrated that I can't instantly know what has taken me 7
years with linux.... :-)

--Yan