Re: [exim] exim wakes up unmounted sata disk

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 11:32 AM, W B Hacker <wbh@???> wrote:
> * Tawan Ruanebo wrote:
>>
>> hi,
>>
>> i have several sata hard drives connected to my debian testing
>> machine. two of them are data drives that spin down after ten minutes
>> of no access. only one of them wakes up every half hour. so i
>> unmounted the two disks, and the one still wakes up regularly. it took
>> me some time to find out (via lastcomm) that exim is responsible for
>> this. it is the only process running at exactly the moment the disk
>> wakes up. nobody had any idea how this could be, maybe somebody here
>> can help me out. i sometimes don't use these drives for days, so i'd
>> really like to not have them sit there producing nothing but heat.
>>
>> cheers!
>>
>> sarefo
>>
>
> Exim may well be what is running - BUT - I'm inclined to believe it is doing
> so - at least at the same time that those drives are fired-up, as a result
> of a cron job, accounting, log-rotation check, or syslogd that is checking
> queues, quotas, filesystem health, log size/age, or other storage-related
> things - more especially if it is within a minute or so of the same time,
> and on a rigid schedule.
>
> A grep -r of /var/log on timestamps should find the perp.

yay, there it is :) it's the smartd. very smart if it wakes up the
disks every time ;) but of course in hindsight that makes perfect
sense. i just find it strange that it doesn't show up in lastcomm, or
in crontab.

many thanks, you saved my peace of mind and some bucks from my energy bill :)

cheers

sarefo

--
How terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise, Johnny.