Disk access LED flashing regularly

neok · 2010-04-16 13:41:52

Hi,

I have a recent (<2 months) installation of the latest Arch Linux on an AMD64 computer and I have noticed that the HDD access LED flashes shortly every 2-3 secs. My partitions are formatted in Ext4 and this flashing occurs even when I am just in the console and not using the machine.

Is this normal or should I start worrying about rootkits etc?

My thanks in advance.

Ramses de Norre · 2010-04-16 14:22:25

Some app might be writing a lot to its log file.

Vain · 2010-04-16 14:49:48

You could trying doing the following to find out what's writing to your disk:

# echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump
# tail -f /var/log/everything.log

(echo 0 to disable it.)

Be aware, though, that you'll also see the logging process itself.

knopwob · 2010-04-16 16:20:55

hey,

the same thing happens with my computer. You can look into it with iotop.This will show you, which program causes the io-load. In my case it's jdb2, which is part of ext4 iirc.

neok · 2010-04-17 04:35:10

neok wrote:

Hi,
I have a recent (<2 months) installation of the latest Arch Linux on an AMD64 computer and I have noticed that the HDD access LED flashes shortly every 2-3 secs. My partitions are formatted in Ext4 and this flashing occurs even when I am just in the console and not using the machine.
Is this normal or should I start worrying about rootkits etc?
My thanks in advance.

My thanks for the replies, I tried iotop and enabling block-dump but both will not work, I think its because I am using a custom compiled kernel and I don' have accounting enabled, apparently. But I will be looking into this soon, perhaps rebooting with the Arch kernel.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-04-16 13:41:52

Disk access LED flashing regularly

#2 2010-04-16 14:22:25

Re: Disk access LED flashing regularly

#3 2010-04-16 14:49:48

Re: Disk access LED flashing regularly

#4 2010-04-16 16:20:55

Re: Disk access LED flashing regularly

#5 2010-04-17 04:35:10

Re: Disk access LED flashing regularly

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