Finding what is accessing drive?

[Neil Dugan]

On Sat, 2005-04-09 at 21:56 -0400, jludwig wrote:
> On Saturday 09 April 2005 09:33 pm, Neil Dugan wrote:
> > Hi
> >
> > I have a small computer with FC3 installed on a ext3 partition, being
> > used as a PostgreSQL database server.
> >
> > I setup hdparm to turn off the hard-drive, but something is accessing
> > the hard-drive making it stay on.
> >
> > Using 'top -i' it seems that kjournald seems to be accessing the hard-
> > drive every few minutes.  There is no man page for kjournald.
> >
> > What is kjournald?
> > Any ideas on locating what program is accessing the hard-drive if it
> > isn't kjournald?
> >
> > Regards Neil.
> There are many deamons that will do this syslogd, crond, updatedb, even 
> iptables.  This is actually normal house keeping for a Linux/Unix system.
> -- 
> John H Ludwig

Yes I understand that many things could be doing the access.  I am
looking for finding out what is doing the access, maybe I don't need it,
and it can be disabled.

It doesn't seem to be syslogd (the /var/log/messages isn't expanding),
it isn't crond (nothing is due to run), and updatedb is triggered by
cron (witch isn't, and not so regulaly).

Because I am running lcd4linux, which was reading stuff from the hard
drive every few seconds I remounted the partition with the option of
'noatime'.  So I would expect that whatever is accessing the hard drive
is doing a write.  I tried to find the file with the command
'date;ls -at --full-time | head'
but this didn't seem to get me anywhere. 

Any ideas on how to track down what is causing the access?

Regards Neil.