Re: cron job?

[Stefan Rieken <StefanRieken@SoftHome.net>]

"R.G. Mayhue" wrote:
> 
> Hello fellow patriots,
> 
> Twice now (in as many months), something has started and run on my
> system when I was in the middle of something important and caused me to
> loose much work. I think it is a system related job. Like a cron file
> cleaning job or something. The hard drive starts to thrash with
> constant activity and it uses so much of the system's resources that X
> Window applications become unresponsive. Typing or moving the cursor
> becomes almost impossible. This can go on for about anywhere between 15
> to 30 min. In the end X will crash catching a signal 7 and all unsaved
> work is lost 8(
> 

Dear Clue less :-)

I had a problem alike once; it was a "find" job, ran by updatedb, by
cron by anacron etc. This was a little noisy, slowing down the system
etc., but it was harmless. What you say sounds harmful.

I dunno what you've got, but this is what I did to solve my "mysterious
process": I had a non-X command line interface open under the "root"
login. Every time the mysterious process started, I switched back to
this CLI immediately and typed in "ps ax >ps1.txt". This dumps the
process list to the textfile ps1.txt

After having collected some textfiles, I compared them. There was one
"find" process that kept coming back. I knew "find" can be responsible
for such noise, so I guessed this was the process I was looking for.
With that info, some newsgroup people could help me on.

So please do this check first. Maybe you'll find that your computer is
defragmentating or whatever... First find the process, then we'll think
about where it came from.

Greets,

Stefan