Harddrive use….

thinair

I notice with my firewall that the harddrive activity light flashes every second or so, I'm assuming it's to save ntop stats. I have two questions regarding this.

Will this be an issue when I move to a CF card?
Can I get ntop to keep the stats in RAM for a while and dump them every hour or so if that's what is causing the drive activity.

sullrich

@thinair:

I notice with my firewall that the harddrive activity light flashes every second or so, I'm assuming it's to save ntop stats. I have two questions regarding this.

Will this be an issue when I move to a CF card?

Can I get ntop to keep the stats in RAM for a while and dump them every hour or so if that's what is causing the drive activity.

As far as I know NTOP saves the settings in ram. How often is this blink occuring?

thinair

once a second, all the time

sullrich

@thinair:

once a second, all the time

Which version?

thinair

0.92

And I turned ntop off, and it's the same actually, I guess it has nothing to do with ntop. I don't know why I didn't turn it off before posting….damn assumptions. ::)

sullrich

@thinair:

0.92

And I turned ntop off, and it's the same actually, I guess it has nothing to do with ntop. I don't know why I didn't turn it off before posting….damn assumptions. ::)

Run top and see if you see anything bursting to the upper top of the list every second.

thinair

php is the only one that stays on top with 0.3-0.4%

thinair

I rebooted the firewall, things seem ok now. I stood there for like a minute, no activity. When I ran top, top was the top programming running…..

sullrich

@thinair:

php is the only one that stays on top with 0.3-0.4%

Do this from a shell (option 8 from ssh or console):

fetch -o ~/test.sh http://www.pfsense.com/~sullrich/find_php.sh
chmod a+rx ~/test.sh && ~/test.sh

Look for which process is taking up the most time. mini_httpd will show up all the time so somewhat discard that one.

sullrich

Actually, do that from a SSH session.

thinair

php status_service.php showed up oncein a couple minutes, aside from that, nothing else but mini_httpd. And that was from SSH.

sullrich

@thinair:

php status_service.php showed up oncein a couple minutes, aside from that, nothing else but mini_httpd. And that was from SSH.

Hrm. Very strange.

thinair

It the hdd activity light starts flashing often again, I'll retry those commands and post the results.

As a note, it didn't seem to matter if my connection was idle or active either.

ZGamer

when in doubt reboot;). How long after you reboot does it do this?

Memory glitch??…it's a guess.

Cojo

I have the same problem. The HDD activity flashes all the time. And it starts right after boot.
I use Beta 3 and have no extra packages installed.

hoba

what's your amount of ram?

Cojo

I have 256Mb of ram.

Criggie

@Cojo:

I have the same problem. The HDD activity flashes all the time. And it starts right after boot.
I use Beta 3 and have no extra packages installed.

I had a similar problem ages ago with a 0.8 series. Turned out that the firewall couldn't resolve the ntp server address because the dns servers were not right/reachable.

So my advice is just search for anything thats wrong.

Criggie

@thinair:

Will this be an issue when I move to a CF card?

Apparently you can tell the system to mount the CF card r/o and only mount it r/w while a config change happens.

To do that you put the single word wrap into /etc/platform

echo wrap > /etc/platform

But that made no difference for me even after a restart.

hoba

it's not "wrap" anymore, it was changed to "embedded" some time ago