On 09:54 02 May 2002, Eric Wood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: | From: "Chad and Doria Skinner" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | > My linux box writes to the disk at about 5 - 15 second intervals even when | > no one is logged in. Is there any way to prevent this so that the disks | will | > spin down into standby mode? | | You've probably running cron which has to run somthing. cron causes | /etc/mtab's access time to be update which causes ext3 to flush the hard | drive which causes the hard drive actitivity which causes the hard drive to | never go to sleep.
As remarked, it may well be access time updates from monitoring stuff (like cron). You can mount your partitions with "noatime". I do this, and there are few ill effects unless you really care about correct atime values, which are little used. Note that programs like biff and other mail spool monitors generally do depend on atime (mtime(spool-file) > atime(spool-file) ==> "new mail!"). Your call. Also run a "tail -f" of your system log (/var/log/messages usually) and and watch it for a minute or so to check that it's mostly idle - if there's some service logging like mad, that too will cause disc access and "noatime" won't help there - you need to lower it's logging level, turn it off, or log to a drive you don't want to spin down (eg on another host). Cheers, -- Cameron Simpson, DoD#743 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.zip.com.au/~cs/ Warning: Do not look into laser with remaining eye. - Charlie Stross <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ Redhat-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
