I recently installed Mandriva 2008.1 on a new computer and so far everything seems to have gone great, except for one minor issue. I noticed that there seemed to be a lot of idle drive activity, as though something were accessing the harddrive every few seconds. The activity light is almost always blinking but I couldn't seem to find anything running that would account for it. Finally I happened to catch a process start and stop while looking at htop today and I think I have found the "problem," but I'm not sure how to fix it.

It seems that hddtemp (a harddrive temperature monitoring package) is constantly being started in the background. My auth.log contains evidence like this:

As you can see, something is running hddtemp every 5 seconds. Aside from the fact that it is filling up my logs, it's really annoying and I'd rather not have the drive constantly being accessed like this. Hddtemp is also run as a service at start-up, but stopping the service (service hddtemp stop) doesn't seem to help. For reference, my harddrive is a Western Digital Caviar RE WD1600YS, 160Gb SATA drive. Does anyone have any ideas/suggestions? Thanks!

stopping the service should help so am a lost on that one.

2) I installed it to have a look but could find some /etc/ files but none on timing.

I suggest you disable this on bootup as well pls and I rely on lm_sensors with a gui gkrellm for other temps (not hdd) and they have little impact.

BTW if you have a service checking a drive of course you are going to see drive light activity.

3) however if you still want it, consider having it removed from auth log. Not sure but probably pam may have a setting?

hddtemp config is usually found in /etc/sysconfig/ and the datadase is /etc/hddtemp.db

/etc/smartd.conf is a package that allows the timings of the sensors for harddrives.

and sensors for motherboard sensors.


/etc/smartd.conf has lots of info as to how and when the process can be setup.

Hope this helps, cheers, Glenn

damn I did look at syscofig but had not thought of smart ....good one Glenn

I checked in /etc/sysconfig and there was a config file for hddtemp, but it didn't contain any information on timing or anything similar. And it turns out I don't have smartd installed. The hddtemp settings in sysconfig only seem to pertain to the hddtemp daemon and to me it looks like some other program is constantly trying to run it manually. I haven't been able to find out where the command to run it is coming from though.

In any event, I just decided to uninstall it. I'd still be interested in finding out what was causing this problem if anyone knows, since it is a neat little program. Thanks.

The sensors package is for monitoring the motherboard (fans, temps and voltages) libsensors. It is NOT used by the lm_sensors directly.

See also the lm_sensors homepage at:
http://www.lm-sensors.org/

This file is used by /etc/init.d/lm_sensors and defines the modules to
be loaded/unloaded. This file is sourced into /etc/init.d/lm_sensors.


smartd http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net is for the smart monitoring built into modern harddrives.

man hddtemp reveals...

DESCRIPTION
hddtemp will give you the temperature of your hard drive by reading
Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) infor‐
mation on drives that support this feature. Only modern hard drives
have a temperature sensor. hddtemp supports reading S.M.A.R.T. infor‐
mation from SCSI drives too. hddtemp can work as simple command line
tool or as a daemon.

You can specify one or more device drive path, where each path can be
prefixed with a type like PATA, SATA or SCSI to force hddtemp too use
one of these type (because detection can fail).


As with most of these type of package, we need to configure it before it works.


Anyway, I think you could set it up, you'll need to research some more.

Cheers, Glenn

Thanks for all the replies and I really appreciate the help, and I don't want to sound rude, but I think some of the replies have missed the point. I had hddtemp installed and configured correctly. The daemon would run at start-up and would report drive temps just fine. The problem is that some other program kept trying to run hddtemp via a command line every 5 seconds. This is annoying, and is compounded by the fact that these repeated run attempts are being logged in places like auth.log because whatever is running it is using userhelper to do it.

I suspect this is some bizarre problem with the Mandriva implementation of hddtemp. Hddtemp was installed with my new installation of 2008.1 and everything appeared to be set up correctly until I noticed that my auth.log file was huge. It looks to me like something similar to a cron job keeps running it every 5 seconds (but I checked all my scheduled cron jobs and no luck). The reason I think this is because stopping the hddtemp service does not fix the problem (I also stopped it from loading at boot time and that still didn't work).

Perhaps the better question is does anyone know what services typically use uerhelper to execute jobs? I know userhelper is a service that writes out all sorts of stuff to the standard out when you use it to execute commands, but I'm not sure why it would be used to run hddtemp in this case.

My auth log is only 37.5kb

Sorry if I was off topic.

well I probably equally guilty but I live in aussieland so am already a convict.

1) the daemon runs ok at startup is good to know but only suggests thats an init script

2) so I am wondering if you have changed your log to hide your username or is that the true message?

I am wondering if, you would like to try a work around (means I am not cluey enough on pam)

use root powers to directly add your user name to /usr/sbin/hddtemp reboot and see if there is any change.

I am looking at this....but I do not want you to lose more meaningful messages

http://linux.die.net/man/3/pam_authenticate

After about 2 days, my auth.log was about 10mb or so in size. I know it's not a huge problem or anything, but it's really annoying. I'm also a little paranoid about log sizes since I once misconfigured a program to log way too much stuff in a very short period of time and ended up filling all the free space on my root drive -- there wasn't even enough space left to start x and since I was a big newbie at the time I wasn't sure what to do. So ever since then I've been trying to keep better track of all my logging services.

That's correct, I am hiding my username and my computer name.

I will try this to see if anything happens. This might solve the logging problem since it's obviously userhelper that's logging to auth.log and not hddtemp.

I also had the opportunity to install hddtemp on a machine running Mandriva 2008.0. I used urpmi to install it and it runs just fine -- and nothing is attempting to run it every 5 seconds. So I'm even more suspicious that somewhere in the 2008.1 distro is a program that is configured to continuously execute hddtemp instead of just letting the daemon do its job.

I just noticed the same problem on my machine (Fedora10), and - for my case - found the solution:
I was running ksensors, to display the CPU temp and Fan speed in the system dock. If I kill ksensors, the log messages go away; if I increase the checking interval there (default is 5 seconds), then the time interval of the log messages increases.

I have not yet found a way to use ksensors without it checking HDD temp - still looking into that.

UPDATE:
It seems that ksensors starts periodically checking HDD-temp after configuring HDD-temp readout for the first time. This creates configuration sections in /home/<username>/.kde/share/config/ksensorsrc.
I have not found any way to stop periodic HDD-temp checking from within ksensors. However, after I stopped ksensors, manually deleted all sections pertaining to HDD-temp from the configuration file, and then restarted ksensors, periodic checking has stopped.
So far I have found no way of teaching ksensors to query a running hddtemp daemon instead of doing the checking itself - the hddtemp daemon does not seem to create offending log entries.

in my case it was webminstat module for webmin. this software has one of graph - hddtemp. when i stoped this sensor in this software - that kind messages in auth.log disapeared

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Hi, I'm glad you found the solution! I, for one was puzzled.

Please make you thread as "SOLVED"

Regards Glenn