Unknown activity

[yogee]

On my RedHat7 network server I see the hard drive ticking away as though its being accessed. I have it boot to gnome log on screen and just leave it. How can I see for sure what is going on? I do have a monitor able to give me visuals and I can run gnome which I prefer. It is setup to serve dhcp,web,mail,ssh,webmin,vnc and so on, but no telnet anymore. Ive gone through the logs as best as a newbie can do. The system also seems to go to sleep after bout 10 minutes, or atleast the monitor will turn black till I move the mouse. Any way to see if im being played a fool here? I AM TOO NEW!

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What do you mean when you say edit?

[Tigger]

Most likely this is due to the updatedb utility running. This creates the locate database and most distros have it as a cron job that runs daily.If you do a 'top' while the activity is happening, you will see what is actively churning the harddrive.

As far as the screen blanking, this is a standard thing that happens. There is a screen blanking function that is usually configured for about 10 - 15 minutes for most distros. I am not running RH7 at the present time so I can't tell you exactly where it is.

the command should be something like this:

/bin/setterm -blank 10 <-- change this to 60 for a longer delay. 60 is the max. set it to 0 to disable it.

[:strain:]

If the screen is blanking in X, do a man XF86Config and edit the Server arguments section with the commands to stop it from blanking. When I just checked one of them was
Option "BlankTime" "0"

but if I didn't leave you to find for yourself, you wouldn't learn anything.

[yogee]

Wow, thanx alot for the great info. The "top" command gives awsome info. And oh yeah, its running squid too. Thanx agian.

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What do you mean when you say edit?

[mdwatts]

Linux always does a lot of processing (housekeeping) in the background. If it's excessive, you may want to check your logs and also adjust what is written to them. It's not like Win9x, where the only thing it does in the background is write the cache. Nothing much else to MS.

Since you have quite a few server/services active, you can expect some extra activity. Updatedb should only be scheduled to run once daily. At least it is on mine.