Heres a quick question....

I've been running Slack 10.2 on my rig for about 6 months now and normally my box just sits there quietly humming away unless i'm using it .. but recentley i've noticed brief hard drive activity about every 5-6 second when my machine is idle... Is this normal ??

PC seems to be running smoothly... hard disk is only about 35% full and idle proc load is at 0-1%
Only app i'm running in the backgound is Karamba

I just want to make sure this isn't a bigger problem starting to brew now.

Thanks for the help
Later

edit... I've also noticed that when running the TOP command my free memory is consistantly dropping with hard drive activity... any ideas ??

There might be some service active such as locatedb updates which is running during the computer idle time.

check your /var/log/syslog and /var/log/messages file.

When you notice the activity on your hard drive, run the "top" (without quotes) from a terminal. That will tell you what process is using the most cpu power.

Bob

I had a similar problem. After killing the processes one by one, I found that it was caused by the login attempts via ssh (/var/log/messages was full of logs of failed attempts). These are caused by the port scanners of course. I first tried changing the maximum login failures and wait period for users in sshd_config, but since most attempts were made with the name of a different user, that didn't work very well. I finally googled for an iptables ruleset which drops packets for a certain amount of time from an IP which makes 4 unsuccessful login attempts in the last 60 seconds or so. That solved the problem for me.

You can check this page for the ruleset I used:

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/187

the memory decreases due to Linux caching disk data in ram for faster access in the future, so this is normal. You won't run out of ram because of it

Thanks for the fast replies... here is a snipit of the "messages.1" file...

Mar 30 22:19:51 slackbox kernel: AGP: Found AGPv3 capable device at 1:0:0
Mar 30 22:19:51 slackbox kernel: AGP: Enough AGPv3 devices found, setting up...
Mar 30 22:19:51 slackbox kernel: AGP: Setting up AGPv3 capable device at 0:0:0
Mar 30 22:19:51 slackbox kernel: AGP: Putting device into 4x mode
Mar 30 22:19:51 slackbox kernel: AGP: Setting up AGPv3 capable device at 1:0:0
Mar 30 22:19:51 slackbox kernel: AGP: Putting device into 4x mode
Mar 30 22:38:44 slackbox -- MARK --
Mar 30 22:58:44 slackbox -- MARK --
Mar 30 23:18:44 slackbox -- MARK --
Mar 30 23:38:44 slackbox -- MARK --
Mar 30 23:58:44 slackbox -- MARK --
Mar 31 00:18:44 slackbox -- MARK --
Mar 31 00:38:44 slackbox -- MARK --
Mar 31 00:58:44 slackbox -- MARK --
Mar 31 01:18:44 slackbox -- MARK --
Mar 31 01:38:44 slackbox -- MARK --
Mar 31 01:58:44 slackbox -- MARK --
Mar 31 02:18:44 slackbox -- MARK --
Mar 31 02:38:44 slackbox -- MARK --
Mar 31 02:58:44 slackbox -- MARK --
Mar 31 03:18:44 slackbox -- MARK --
Mar 31 03:38:44 slackbox -- MARK --
Mar 31 03:58:44 slackbox -- MARK --
Mar 31 04:18:44 slackbox -- MARK --
Mar 31 04:38:44 slackbox -- MARK --
Mar 31 04:58:44 slackbox -- MARK --

are all these dates and times followed by -- MARK -- normal... theres tons of them along with other stuff such as mounting cdroms, starting X, etc...

also I started out with 658 Mb of memory free last night, and today it settled on 327 Mb free...
I don't know ... I'm still learning the ins ands outs of linux so alot of stuff is unfamiliar when compared to that other OS.

Linux caches memory unlink Windows, so it may look like almost all of your memory is being used, but it's just reserved.

This perhaps is OT but if you are interested in keeping tabs on your system processes, you might want to check out gkrellm which support hard drive activity monitoring, among other things