Hello, I am currently running slackware 9.1 on a box that i have set up as a router for my home network.
The problem is the box is in my bedroom, so i need it to be quiet. I have eliminated all fan noise, now my only problem is the hdd keeps spinning up every 5-10 mins or so, presumably to do a small read or write.
How can i figure out what is accessing the hdd so that i can stop it?
I have disabled pretty much all firewall logging, as i thought that might be causing it, but that didnt help. /var/log/messages dosent show anything useful, about 1 entry every 20min which i dont think would be causing this.
Any ideas?

oh btw i tried using 'top' to catch the process in the act, but i think it accesses the hdd for such a short period of time that it dosent show up in top

If this thing needs to be silent the only way would be to turn off logging (disable syslog) or make it write to a share somewhere else. And make the disk drive mount read only. You maybe could use network shares or ram drives for /tmp and /var

If you are going for a silent machine, you need to use Compact Flash instead of a HDD.

It will take some custom work to get the OS installed and bootable from the CF card (it has to be RAMDISK based), but it really isn't that hard. It took me a few days to work the bugs out of my system.

DavidPhillips, thanks, ill try disabling syslog and if that dosent help, ill try mounting the hdd as read only. Im not clued up enough to set up a ramdisk&log to that, although maybe i will try to learn.


MS3FGX, thanks for the suggestion, but thats a tad more complex and expensive than i can really do atm.

my hdd led flashes every 5-20 seconds. how can i log requests to hdds? (except that log itself.)
it did not flash on fresh installed system.
behavior like this was also on windows.
may be that is caused/started(?) in the hdds own internal chips?
there are 4 ide cables and 2 hdds and 1 dvd-rw drive.

iotop
you can look at 1 process history this way: iotop -p 361 -b