Suspicious hard drive activity

Running Red Hat Fedora 4

We have a dsl connected machine which has hard drive
activity every 3-4 seconds.

It becomes active, then stops, 3-4 seconds then active.

When the dsl/network connection is removed, the activity
stops.

Any ideas on whay this is happening?

Security checks I can run?

Regards,

Pardon me if I am talking down to you, but at the command line type "top" (without the quotes).
You will see a list of the most active processes running.
Watch the list in top when your disk is active. You will see the 'busy' processes at the 'top' of the list.
Maybe then you can then look up details about that process(es) and how to configure it. Maybe it is unnecessary and can be terminated.

It's probably sync -ing your logs to disk.

appreciate the replies.

1. I tried "top", but not during the hard drive activity. excellent idea.

2. Logs; could be, but the activity seems tied to the network connection.

Perhaps just a little paranoid, but I like to know whats happening on
my machines.

Thanks in advance to all

the reason i suggested that it might be the logs, is that if you are running
iptables, then whenever you're connected to the network, iptables is probably logging
stuff continually. therefore, as the logs would be written each time there's a sync.

when you are not connected, naturally, iptables wouldn't be logging

I am sure someone here could tell you how to verify this...