Hey guys, thanks very much for your suggestions. Those were exactly the sorts of things I was looking for.
Here's what I've found (I'll try to keep this brief):
1. Nothing seemed wrong with any of my /var/log files.
2. Nothing seemed wrong with any of my cron activity.
3. I performed a very exhaustive search of newsgroup postings and came across the following message, which seemed to describe my situation
exactly.
-------------------------------
From:
suntong001@my-deja.com (suntong001@my-deja.com)
Subject: Redhat: hard drive accessing
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Date: 2000/09/30
Hi,
I found that my Redhat6.2 tries to access my hard drive about every 5 seconds. I'm using a 256M RAM P3 with 1G swap, So I am really curious why redhat access my HD so often.
I didn't seem to notice this on my debian, maybe I'm wrong...
Please provide your comments, tips or tools, etc on this, thanks!
* Tong *
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To make a long story short, a respondent suggested the cause of this problem is likely a Gnome process called magicdev.
I had already listed all of my processes running and, using the process of elimination, had begun killing daemons I thought most likely to be the cause of my problem.
Sure enough, once I then killed magicdev, the vast majority of my incessant hard drive access noises ceased.
So, for whatever reason, magicdev seems to be the cause of this particular problem.
It just so happens I'm going to be upgrading to Red Hat 7.2 this week. So, fortunately, I think that will permanently solve this magicdev issue as well while I'm at it.
Guys, thanks again for your help with this issue. I learned a lot in the process!
Thanks again,
Ben