Hello all,

I installed antix yesterday after trying various distributions.Other than the standard install i have installed dnmasq ipmasq dhcp3-server hdparm and arno-iptables-firewall. Im using the system as a firewall router. the only issue is that the hd never powers down, Ive tried manually sending the hard drive to sleep using the -y option but the drives wakes up within a minute, ive tried shutting down the arno firewall, dhcp3 server and samba but still i cannot get the hard drive to sleep.

There must be some process that is accessing the hard drive atleast every minute, anyone know how to tell which process is accessing the drive or which program in the standard antix install does this?

conky shows 5% cpu usage 80mb ram used of 1gb and swap is 0b of 1gb.

Thanks

Hello awinner:

I don't have any experience with the programs you listed as being installed. However, htop will let you know which processes are running and how much CPU and RAM they comsume.

I hope this helps. Hopefully someone with more experience with your problem will give you a better answer.

Best regards,

Pedro

You don't mention your hardware ide or sata. This might help out.


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eriefisher wrote:You don't mention your hardware ide or sata. This might help out.


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thanks for the replies, its and ide drive, ive set the drive to sleep after 5 mins with drive, i dont think this is the issue, the drive is getting woken up by some disk activity which i cant figure out. Ive used top to see whats running but that hasnt revealed anything.

Hi awinner,

I do not have any new insight on your issue, but I do welcome you to antiX and hope that collectively we can help you out.

Maybe try as root
or if it doesn't work, try
where /dev/sda is your hard drive. This is a hack, but it may help. If not, try checking your bios settings - perhaps there is a problem with the power saving settings. If not, try looking in synaptic for some tools for your brand of laptop.

john

Thanks for the replies, after a lot of googling i found this:

sudo sh -c"echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump"

Then, to see all disk activity:

Code:

tail -f /var/log/syslog

To later turn off the logging of that information run:

Code:

sudo sh -c"echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump"

having found that, i saw that kjournald was the problem, i then found out that linux, the way it behaves with sysklogd and klogd and the ext3 file system, is not conducive to spinning the drive down. I found this article
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" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false , as a result i got laptop mode tools running and now my drive spins down and unless i do something on the antix box will only spin up every two hours.

I run the box as a file server and firewall router and it runs like a charm with minmal cpu and ram usage, Antix is a great minimal debian distro.

awinner,

thanks for providing the feedback. I'm sure this will be of use to others that want to use antiX as a file server and firewall router.

Just to ask, which version of antiX are you using? The base or full version of M7.5?

Im using the full distro, i did try the base distro first but i had some probs with the network setup, though that was me rather than antix, when i got on to the full distro i didnt use antixs network setup, i manually edited /etc/network/interfaces to suit. I actually have five network interfaces (sis onboard, dual port ibmPro, hpNC770 dual port gigabit) which all detected fine, eth0 is in bridge mode to my adsl modem and i connect using the pppoe client, the other four ports are bridged together as br0 using brctl and act as a switch.