On Saturday 01 February 2003 20:00, Jeff wrote: > I've been working on this issue for some time now. I'm running a > Testing system and I want to hard drive to spin down when it's idle. > This worked nicely for me under Woody, but something has changed and I > can't figure it out. > > I run noflushd, and when I set the idle time to 3 minutes, the HDD > will spin down for about 1.5 minutes before spinning back up. I've > testing idle times of 5 minutes and more, but the HDD never spins > down. > > I run a couple of scripts to see what files and directories are being > accessed that are less that 5 minutes old: > > #!/bin/bash > find / -mount -type f -mmin -5 > find /usr -mount -type f -mmin -5 > find /home -mount -type f -mmin -5 > > #!/bin/bash > find / -mount -mmin -5 > find /usr -mount -mmin -5 > find /home -mount -mmin -5 > > and I always see the same files and dirs: > > /var/spool/postfix/public/pickup > /var/spool/postfix/public/qmgr > /var/spool/cups/certs > /var/spool/cups/certs/0 > > If I stop cups and postfix, noflushd will spin the hard drive down and > it'll stay down for a good long time, till I start another program or > something that accesses the drive. > > I've been looking at the config files for cups and postfix, but I > haven't figured out what I might do to stop them from hitting the HDD > so often. > > So now, to my questions: > > 1. What config changes might I make to help the situation? > > 2. If postfix can't be changed, what might replace postfix to solve my > problem? I'm not so concerned about cups since I don't need to > print during the times I want the HDD to spin down, so I'll just > stop it. > > thanks, > jc
There are many apps that write to /etc and /var areas. Most stuff written to /var/spool/ can probably be discarded after a reboot so you can create a RAM disk and relocate /var/spool to it. Some apps require to pre-create a directory structure (empty) first. While you are at it you can also move: /tmp /var/run to RAM disk as well. Be careful when using -mtime or -mmin to determine the recently accessed file, as that would only return the recently "modified" files. You should probably use -atime and -amin because the disk would need to spin even when you are only reading. Good luck, Anh -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]