[syslog-ng] Trying to let my harddrive spin down once in a while

[Paul Krizak]

Are you doing anything with syslog-ng's internal log messages?  It's 
maintaining counters and such internally that I believe get written out 
to disk by default once per minute.

But since that's a normal log path, that should be controlled by 
flush_timeout() as well.

Start by trying the flush_timeout() setting, and if that works, then at 
least you know that is something in a log path somewhere causing the 
trouble.

Another thing you could try is removing all of your log paths (not just 
routing them to /dev/null) and see how syslog-ng behaves.

Finally, if you still can't nail it down, use strace to trace syslog-ng 
during a period where it causes the disks to spin up.  You should be 
able to at least see the file it's trying to write.  For example, it 
might be updating its pid file in /var/run once per minute.

Paul Krizak                         7171 Southwest Pkwy MS B200.3A
MTS Systems Engineer                Austin, TX  78735
Advanced Micro Devices              Desk:  (512) 602-8775
Linux/Unix Systems Engineering      Cell:  (512) 791-0686
Global IT Infrastructure            Fax:   (512) 602-0468

On 07/11/2011 11:33 AM, Lars Stokholm wrote:
> And I forgot to add to that, that killing syslog-ng, but keeping crond
> alive, will also allow my harddrive to stay spinned down, so this is
> not crond's fault. As soon as I start syslog-ng I see log entries in
> trace_pipe and my disk starts to wake up a lot.
>
> On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 8:28 PM, Lars Stokholm<lars.stokholm at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> I see, that makes sense. Thanks. I would also like to avoid it if
>> possible. But in order to avoid it, I have to find out why this is
>> happening:
>>
>>>>>>>> As you can probably see, syslog-ng writes every minute at least. I guess
>>>>>>>> that's because my user crontab has a command that gets run every minute.
>>>>>>>> What I don't get is why syslog-ng writes to the disk, even though I'm
>>>>>>>> telling it not to log crond's output.
>>
>> Any ideas? As you can see from my syslog-ng.conf, everything that has
>> to do with crond is sent to /dev/null. So crond output shouldn't cause
>> a spin-up of my harddrive, but it does. Killing crond or removing the
>> once-per-minute-command from my user crontab will allow my harddrive
>> to stay spinned down for a long period of time. But I would rather not
>> do either.
>>
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