Hard Drive continues running
 

I am running Red Hat Linux 8.0. At times the hard drive will start running for no reason at all and continue to run for 5 to 10 minutes. I am not doing anything to the machine. It is just sitting there. What is it doing?

It's writing to the syslog.

what does the syslog do?

Writes info to files like /var/log/messages about what's going on in youru system. Errors get reported here, events (eg: plugging in a USB device).

Have a look at it with 'tail /var/log/messages'' to see the last 10 lines. (You can use tail -N to see the lat N lines as in tail -100 /var/log/messages)

It um.. logs all the goings on in your system :)

cat /var/log/messages
cat /var/log/secure
cat /var/log/<other files are here>

Take a looksee..

Slick.

my linux teacher also said that when it does that it's running some routine file system maintenance scheduled in cron... a few months back I noticed it would do the same thing occasionally.