I have noticed my hard drive cranking for no reason. Recently, I caught it in the act and ran "top," which said nothing. When I quit top, I noticed I had new mail. The message said:

###### LogWatch 2.6 Begin #######
--------------- sendmail Begin -----------------

330 bytes transferred
1 messages sent
--------------- sendmail Begin -----------------

###### LogWatch 2.6 Begin #######

I have no idea what this message means. I also have no idea what LogWatch is or why it needs to keep rattling the hard drive and sending me mail.

I was wondering if anyone knew what LogWatch is and if it's OK to get rid of it.

yes it's ok to remove

It is handy to have on a server, it will mail you the information in your system logs. Some of which may be important.

How exactly do you remove it?

you could try this

Might I add, that it's probably not logwatch rattling your drive.

It's more likely to be locate.

locate does an update I think, once a night to keep it's database fresh.

look in /etc/cron.daily for slocate.cron

and you'll see why you get the rattle

Slick.

Doh! I forgot all about the cron jobs! There's a big bunch of stuff in cron.daily including longwatch and slocate.cron. However, when I caught it action again and ran "top", I couldn't find anything running that was in cron.daily. Does that sort of stuff not show up or was it some other cron job?

Oh, well. I guess I'll try to figure out what the rest of the cron.daily stuff does....

(I assume most of you have moved onto warmer threads, but I just thought I'd at least try to redeem myself by acting like I kind of know what I'm doing.)

It depends on what you've installed as to what appears in cron.daily.

For the most part though it's stuff which is rebuilding generally static databases, updating logfiles, and doing various maintenance routines on your machine.

What you won't see in top is something like :

/etc/cron.daily/somescript [user] [cpu] [mem] [blah]

If you look at the scripts - and the files in /etc/cron.daily are just scripts, you'll see that they launch a program specifically.

So, in the slocate.cron job you might see :

/usr/bin/updatedb -f "nfs,smbfs,ncpfs,proc,devpts" -e "/tmp,/var/tmp,/usr/tmp,/afs,/net"

and that's what you'd see in top. Rather than the script name of \etc\cron.daily\slocate.cron

That's partly because that's the way that scripts work, and partly because that's the way that Linux displays running processes and deals with threads.

Um.. Be happy?



Slick.

Ok. I noticed a few things popping up and running that were in cron.daily. I always feel better knowing what my computer is doing. That's one of the things I have against Windows.