Hi, so, I have CentOS 6.something, it's old (I can find the exact number if you want but for this question I doubt it matters). I've had it for 8 years.

Every night at 4am it does it's maintence or whatever, and the drive starts crunching. I rarely every use it (it's a lan server I use for development).

So, can I set it to only run that like once a week? I know how to edit crons, but which cron is it?

Hard drive's been acting up lately, so maybe on the way to death soon, so I'll back up, obviously, but anyway, I'd rather not stress it.

Thanks guys,

rw

It'a a bit hard to say without knowing which job in particular is causing the activity. I don't know of any default job that gets run at 4 AM. The default settings have the jobs in /etc/cron.daily started by anacron at a random time between 0305 and 0350. Most of those files could simply be moved to /etc/cron.weekly, though I'd suggest leaving the "0logwatch" and "logrotate" jobs where they are. Several of those jobs have the potential to cause a lot of activity, but normally don't unless the system has seen a lot of updates since the last run.

Of course any of the jobs in /var/spool/cron could be doing something at 4 AM, but since none of those are part of a standard installation, only you would know what is in there. Other possibilities include /etc/crontab and the files in /etc/cron.d, but again, a standard installation doesn't have anything in there that runs at 4 AM or, for that matter, that causes heavy activity.

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As root, then as user, run crontab -l to list any cron jobs. If you find one, run crontab -e and remark them out with a #.

A web search for "default cron jobs debian" turned up no references to default cron jobs.

This article might help: https://www.debian-administration.or...ling_with_cron.

How is that relevant for what was stated to be a CentOS 6 installation?

Looks like its only for the current user.

Look in your /var/log/auth.log for something like these lines

Look for something about 4am and make note of the user (bolded)
Then login to that user and run crontab -l and see which ones might be at 4am.

Fixed it- When I read what rknichols said about it not being something in the standard distro, I dug in and found that it was rsnapshot running the daily iteration. A forehead-smacking moment for me.

Thanks all,

rw