Hi,
I have a couple of debian systems acting as media PC's that I want to make
as silent and economic as possible. One of the challenges is making the HD
spin (and stay) down when I don't use it for more than an hour or so.
The problem is that both system (single HD) seem to write to (or read from)
the HD every 10-20 seconds or so. At first I thought these were kernel/log
messages being written but a little investigation revealed that this wasn't
it (timestamps, and disabling the kernel and syslog daemons). Then I
thought it might be the ext3 fs writing it's journal, but even mounting the
HD as ext2 (is changing the line in fstab enough?) made no difference.
I tried to stop every daemon alive until I was left with a barely living
system to no avail.
Can anybody tell me where to look or how to find out what process is writing
to (or reading from) the HD that makes spindown in a single HD system
impossible?
I use a homebrewn kernel (2.6.14). Is or are there kernel option(s) that
check the filesystem that I can (should) disable like inotify or dnotify?
Grtz,
Martin.