maintenance program

atomas123 · 09-10-2006, 12:46 PM

hi
I use Suse 10.1, and every now and then at night the hard drive is very active for 30 minutes or more. eventhough I am not working on the computer.

is it some maintenance program that act like that?

I have look at the active processus, but I must admit I am kind of lost.

uselpa · 09-10-2006, 12:53 PM

As user root, type

Code:

crontab -l | grep -v ^#

and post the output.

cs-cam · 09-10-2006, 01:09 PM

Chances are it's your slocate DB updating, most distro automatically have it done at 12am every night.

atomas123 · 09-10-2006, 03:30 PM

I have tried crontab -l | grep -v ^#
as root and as user
and the result is no crontab for either one

uselpa · 09-10-2006, 03:46 PM

That's strange.
The next time, run `top` when your computer becomes busy again and watch what processes are running at that time.

stress_junkie · 09-10-2006, 04:07 PM

I'm using OpenSuSE v10.1 and I've been running SuSE desktop distributions since v9.0. I suspect that, as cs-cam suggested, the system is running updatedb to update the database that is used by the locate command.

The *SuSE system has several cron files for the system. It's an irritating "feature". Here are the locations of the various crontab files for system maintenance jobs.

Code:

$ ls /etc/*cron*
/etc/cron.deny  /etc/crontab  /etc/sysstat.cron

/etc/cron.d:
sysstat

/etc/cron.daily:
beagle-crawl-system       suse.de-check-battery  suse.de-update-preload
logrotate                 suse.de-clean-core     suse-do_mandb
suse-clean_catman         suse.de-clean-tmp      suse-tetex
suse.de-backup-rc.config  suse.de-cron-local
suse.de-backup-rpmdb      suse.de-updatedb

/etc/cron.hourly:

/etc/cron.monthly:

/etc/cron.weekly:
wwwoffle

You can see that /etc/cron.daily directory contains a file called suse.de-updatedb. This is the actual script that is run to update the file that is used by the locate utility. I think that the whole "feature" of these cron jobs is directed by the file /etc/crontab with the line:

Code:

-*/15 * * * *   root  test -x /usr/lib/cron/run-crons && /usr/lib/cron/run-crons >/dev/null 2>&1

Here you can see that this tells the normal system cron daemon to run a file called /usr/lib/cron/run-crons. This is a bash shell script. This is really as far as I care to investigate this idiotic trail of scripts that Novell SuSE has in place. Nevertheless it is clear that /etc/crontab runs /usr/lib/cron/run-crons which then decides what maintenance scripts to run.