Michael Schmitz wrote: > > Any suggestions how I can find out what accesses my disk every few seconds > > and thus keeps me from powering it down? > > My guess is you have all sorts of funny daemons running that peek at the > disk every few seconds. With LinuxPPC I had to disable things like > icecast, crossfire, and I think even sendmail, before disk activity would > drop to a sane level.
I don't have any of these; would exim be a usual suspect as well? > lsof +D /var should show some of the usual suspects. That yields syslogd, cron, gdm, XFree86, gnome-pty-helper and lpd. I wouldn't suspect anyone but syslogd here, right? > If you can convince syslogd to write to the log less often this might help, > too. How can I do that? I didn't see anything in the syslogd not syslog-ng manpages. > I didn't tweak any bdflush parameters (tried that before disabling the crazy > services and it didn't help). Would that be via /proc/sys/vm/bdflush? What do the numbers mean? > And I don't get the disk to spin down all of the time... BTW what would be considered a sane timeout for standby? Does it harm the disk if I set it to the minimum of 5 seconds and it gets powered down and back up all the time? Michel -- Earthling Michel Dänzer (MrCooper) \ CS student and free software enthusiast Debian GNU/Linux (powerpc,i386) user \ member of XFree86 and The DRI Project
