[chartreuse]

Just set up my O2 with a fresh install of IRIX 6.5.30 and a Compaq SCA drive taken from an old server of mine, and I've been experiencing this constant repetitive disk activity even when idle. It's almost exactly every second it makes two clicks out of the hard drive. I'm wondering if this is a known thing IRIX does, such as flushing logs every second, or something peculiar about my setup? You can hear audio of it at https://ckits.ca/files/Irix_disk.mp3 or https://twitter.com/ChartreuseK/status/1...01028?s=20

I'm wondering if this is IRIX flushing logs and if it could be tweaked to increase the period to a minute or more, or saving certain ones in a ram drive and not bothering to flush). Or if there's just something wrong with my setup and I'd be better off doing another clean install. 

Someone on twitter advised me that it could be related to swap, but even disabling the swap device `swap -d /dev/swap` provided for no change in behaviour.

If it's not normal I'll see about grabbing a different SCA SCSI drive for it, and hopefully one with a quieter seek anyways. However I don't remember it doing this at any time during the install process, only after booting up into IRIX so I don't believe it's a dying drive.

[Raion]

Yeah that's pretty normal on most installations. There are a lot of background daemons that do things like write to syslog, update documentation, index specific things etc.

One of the biggest on my challenge s systems was some daemon that was doing stuff with documentation. It didn't have a direct chkconfig but I eventually surmised a way to turn it off.

This has been two or three years however so my memories a bit fuzzy

[chartreuse]

Yeah that's pretty normal on most installations. There are a lot of background daemons that do things like write to syslog, update documentation, index specific things etc.

Just seems oddly repetitive to me, and persists after being left running for hours (been up 3 hours today and 4hr last night). And really not much is showing in /var/adm/SYSLOG
I can see sgindexAdmin running in there occasionally, but that doesn't seem to be the cause of this access, as that runs for a bit then completes for various tasks. As well it does make it's own disk accesses when doing that. These constant access still occur while gr_osview shows almost 100% idle with little pulses that seem to correspond to them.


I'll see about finding another hard drive so I can preserve my sanity with it right next to me on my desk, as it never stops.

[Raion]

It's likely not the drive though because my systems do that sometimes. Especially my slower ones.

[chartreuse]

Well can't say I know exactly which one is was without doing a bunch more testing and reboots, but after disabling a bunch more services under chkconfig I managed to get it to stop. Now it's just the occasional disk access which is much more bearable. Turned off unneeded ones like tfxd, sgi_apache, nfsd, autofs, fcagent, sesdaemon, lp, and esd (though I already had that turned off before so that one wasn't the issue surprisingly). Guess I'll find out which one it was if I ever need to re-enable one of them again.

Certainly saving my sanity with the every second repeating disk accesses no longer occuring. The random ones with breaks is much easier on the mind.

[Raion]

esp is SGI's spyware and known vulnerable. Disabling the apache daemon, nfsd (if not running a server), lpd etc is not harmful. I'll have to check the manpages on the others, but I think autofs may have something to do with automounters.

[chartreuse]

esp is SGI's spyware and known vulnerable. Disabling the apache daemon, nfsd (if not running a server), lpd etc is not harmful. I'll have to check the manpages on the others, but I think autofs may have something to do with automounters.

I was reading the man pages of them and they seemed to be things I can do without. I don't believe I need autofs unless something depends on that, but otherwise am fine just putting my nfs mounts into /etc/fstab and manually mounting cd-roms if needed. fcagent and sesdaemon are related to fibre channel disk arrays that I'm not using. And tfxd is for Teleffect which I'm currently not using. I don't see any of these causing issues with my little setup for now, and can always re-enable later.