Logged in twice?

[Kevin J. Cummings]

gilpel at altern.org wrote:
>>> The only process I couldn't figure out that was at the top of "top" was
>>> multiload-apple(t-2). "free" shows that buffers are increasing by 8 KB
>>> each time the light goes on. This seems somewhat related to Firefox
>>> running. It persist some time after it's closed, than stops.
>> Its a part of the gnome-applets RPM.
> 
> OK. But it's not what writes to my disk, because I tried XFCE and
> multiload-applet is not used by XFCE. So let me ask the question more
> directly.
> 
> How to I learn which process keeps writing 8 KB buffers to my disk when I
> do nothing and my modem is switched off?

Linux writes to the disk asynchronously.  Every once in a while it 
spills its write buffers (or some of them) to the disk.  So it could 
take a while for all of them to eventually be written out.  Check out 
the "sync" command to try and flush them immediately.

Is your system swapping?  If so, it could just be parts of the system 
swapping in and out.  If not, it could just be some of the general OS 
housekeeping going on in the background.  You'd need someone who is more 
of a general kernel expert to say for sure.  Linux filesystems have a 
last-accessed field for directories which needs to be written out, even 
if you don't change the contents of any files.

Top looks at CPU times and process sizes, you want to know what looks at 
IO reads/writes.  (Sorry, off the top of my head, I can't remember....)

> Thanks!
> 
> P.s.: Writing emails in this web interface at altern is really a pain.
> What's the way to register to this mailing list without having one's
> personal email address divulged? For instance, in your case, kjchome.net/
> doesn't seem like a valid address.

Its not kjchome.net, its kjchome.homeip.net.  And if you have any doubts 
as to whether or not its a valid address, run it through nslookup (for 
that matter, do a whois on homeip.net while you are at it).  Dyndns is a 
wonderful thing.

While running my own linux system, and having administrative control 
over it, I can create email addresses as I please on this machine and 
manage them.  When a particular email address starts getting spammed, I 
have lots of choices.  I can delete it, I can use lots of tools to 
filter out the spam, I can deny particular hosts access.  Control is a 
great thing.  So is the freedom to do it the way I choose to.

Some people do mask their real email addresses.  That's their business.
Its fairly easy to do.  Learn how to configure your favorite email 
client.  Different methods will probably have different levels of 
success for you.  YMMV

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)