Firmware Configuration

Raspberry Pi & Single-Board Computers

Some settings to watch out for in your BIOS before installing Debian that

Raspberry Pi

vs

EFI & BIOS

Older PC systems use a BIOS EFI– or Basic Input/Output System – to handle core functions before the computer has loaded an operating system.  The BIOS is used to configure fundamental computer settings that affects how hardware interacts with the operating system. 

Modern computer systems use UEFI – or the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface – to manage these settings through a graphic interface.

There are numerous manufacturers who use different BIOS and UEFI for their computer systems.  While not possible to give specific recommendations for computer systems, here are some general computer configurations to watch out for.

 

Disable Unused Hardware 

You can increase the overall security of a home server by disabling extraneous hardware as a proactive measure to decrease your cyber attack surface area.

Some common hardware compoy to disable are:

    Disable all hardware that won't be used (serial/parallel ports, audio, etc).
    Enable all powersaving features on the CPU.
    Disable hyper-threading (NASes generally are not CPU limited, and with today's multi-core CPUs, hyperthreading is mostly unnecessary). I find that single-threaded performance is slightly better without hyper-threading, though we're talking marginal amounts here.
    Disable booting from all HDDs or Controllers (except for the drives I'm actually booting off of).

Power management

Wake on Lan

Keyboard mouse halt

Secure Boot

TPM module

Fast boot 

Restart after failure

Network boot

AHCI vs SATA vs RAID