This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Subject: Re: Question about inode numbers.. From: Adrian Likins <alikins@redhat.com> Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 21:45:11 -0400 On Mon, Sep 11, 2000 at 08:47:08AM -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote: > If the /etc directory has a high inode number compared to other > dirs, and the files in them that get ran at boot time such as > /sbin/*, /bin/*.. is it possible that the drive head will have > to jump all over the disk during rc.d/init.d/* processing? I'm > just curious because I had an "accident" today where my /etc dir > got destroyed and I had to restore it from backup. After the > restoration, at boot time, my hard disk makes some rumbling > noises when "atd" and a few other daemons show up. Just on a > hunch I thought of the above idea and checked the inode > numbers. The numbers for etc are high whereas other dirs are > low. Same for the files in them. > I suspect it's probabaly one of the processes running in the backgroud thats causing it. I've observed similar behaviour on a machine with 5 drives in it raided. Everytime it would boot, it would get to the where it would start up the kdc, and BZZZZZZAAAAAAATTTT! All 5 drives jumping all over the place like mad. Loud enough to startle people several cubes away. Always repeatable, only on startup, but wouldnt do it otherwise. And there wasnt anything obvious in the kdc startup, or any of the preceding few init scripts that would be doing much disk io. Never really investigated too much (not a machine that was rebooted often). I always figured it was probabaly related to either the agressive bdflush values, some process stat'ing the right set of files, or maybe a possesion. ===