Willie Wonka wrote:
> Couple of thoughts;
>
> * I notice the "nobody" account/group(?) start thrashing late at night, when
> the monitor (only) has been sleeping for a little, which translates into me
not
> using the system and it's resources at that time (idle). I ran 'top' when I
> heard this going on (fearing a rootkit), and found 'nobody' using 'find' IIRC
> ...I suspect updating the databases ('updatedb'), or 'inodes' or the ext3
> journal, or defragging (the linux way) - likely being triggered as a 'cron'
> job/task perhaps(?)...yet pushed off in time until there are ebough system
> resources available -- I'm still not sure exactly what it's doing, but the
1st
> time it happened, I 'kill -9 PID' of the processID found using 'top'. It
killed
> it alright, but only until the system had 'rested' and off to the races it
> went, once again.
Yep...
Look what I found in /etc/updatedb.conf
=========
[...]
# run find as this user
LOCALUSER="nobody"
export LOCALUSER
# cron.daily/find: run at this priority -- higher number means lower priority
# (this is relative to the default which cron sets, which is usually +5)
NICE=10
export NICE
=========
Not that this is the cause of your lockups...but could be, or may be just a
'catalyst'. I would imagine the NICE= entry is responsible for amount of
priority, as noted in the above commented lines.
Back to you and Memtest86;
I too have used the Knoppix CD and type this at the prompt;
Boot: memtest86
Just did a bit of searching my local HD, and it turns out I hadn't yet
installed memtest86+ this time around - so I just recently installed it, since
I want to see if the 'update-grub' command would do what it says in the
AutoMagic section.
I recall having 'memtest86' as a GRUB option in the past - so after I run the
update, I'll be back to let you know (since you seemed to have a little trouble
using memtest86+ at first... I guess you thought/think you have to actually
edit (comment/uncomment the "memtest86" line) the /boot/grub/menu.lst file --
but according to AutoMagic, you shouldn't have to. The 'update-grub' command is
all that's needed.
It's important to distinquish between *memtest86* and *memtest86+* - the latter
is newer;
Run these commands for info/explanation;
~$ apt-cache show memtest86
~$ apt-cache show memtest86+
Just to summarize - the newer memtest86*+* is for more recent hardware, and
likely updated with many bugs worked out.
"Memtest86+ is based on memtest86 3.0, and adds support for recent
hardware, as well as a number of general-purpose improvements,
including many patches to memtest86 available from various sources."
Regards
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