What does SuSE do at night?
 

I'm running SuSE 10 and everything works really well! I have a rather strange question...

There seems to be a lot of disk activity at night when i'm asleep. I totally have no idea what the heck Linux is so busy with, since I have no programs like bittorrent open at all. Also no screensaver before someone asks ;)
Is this normal? If not, is there a way to log what my system is so busy with?

examine the contents of /var/log

i cant offer allot of information as im a newbie too but
i think you could try /var/log/messages and try to view
the history of bash commands for every user...
or better
maybe someone is ssh-ing your computer and stealing data
try to save all logs from every user including root
somewhere before night.
next day take all of them again put them somewhere different
make diff against old logs see the differences.
if there are any prolly someone is getting into your computer..

It could be that Suse automatically set up some cron jobs that run at a certain time during the night.

Many distros set up a cron 'updatedb' (or similar) to make file searches faster

Suse likes to kick back at night, have a few drinks and discuss the days events. Some older versions will have a cigarette but that has been removed since 9.2 due to bad PR.

Nah seriously, it'll be updating the slocate database. Nothing scary there :)

Next time you hear the hard-drive spontaneously spring to life at night, pop open a terminal and type "top". This command shows you what programs are running and taking up the most CPU/memory. Most likely you'll find as said earlier that updatedb is being started up by cron.

Or, if your like me and once in bed can't get up for love nor money then examine root's crontab to see what is set to run at night, mostly likely its just a bit of house-keeping like running updatedb

have a look in roots mail as well, you may also find it's been doing tripwire checks.