Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

While reading a PDF, I noticed GKrellM was showing disk activity. I was curious to know what was causing that. Googling “top for disk access” turned up IoTop. Conveniently, this is in the Ubuntu repositories. I installed it with Syntaptic and ran it with sudo iotop. To make it easier to see what’s continually using the disk, press “a” to switch the display to accumulated access.

The disk access was from Galleon, the TiVo media server. I didn’t remember having it running and wasn’t using it, so I turned it off with sudo service galleon stop and disabled it with sudo update-rc.d -f galleon remove, which is the Ubuntu equivalent of chkconfig.

The disk usage went down, but was still going. Next, I saw activity with rsyslogd. In /var/log, the most recently written logs were user.log, syslog and debug. Looking at these showed the rotten Lexmark printer driver at work. It periodically scans for scanners and fills these logs up with debug messages. The last time I called Lexmark about it, they said they couldn’t do anything about it. That was about a year and a half ago. Looks like it’s time to look into that again. That’s another thing for “the list”.

There’s another thing accessing disk, and that’s jdb2, which is part of the journaling file system. I found a post about HAL causing this. This will also go on the list.