[NTLUG:Discuss] Debian hard drive crankiness

[Jack Snodgrass]

On Thu, 2004-06-17 at 12:58, Moses McKnight wrote:
> Thanks for the help.  I have been somewhat confused by anacron vs. cron and 
> didn't know quite where to look.  
I think that anacron runs cron stuff that didn't run because your 
box was down when it was supposed to run the first time... i.e. 
you have a 1am task that is supposed to run but you should down 
your box at 11pm and restart at 8am... anacron will run the 1am tasks
for you... something like that. My box is up 24/7 so I don't run 
anacron. 

as for not running updatedb/slocate... this is needed for the 
locate command to work. I use locate a lot, so I want my 
updatedb to run. If you never use the locate command, then 
you don't need the updatedb tasks. you can always manually 
run updatedb before you run a locat command, but it will take
a while to finish before you can run the locate command. 

you can do something like 
locate iso | grep "\.iso" 
to find all of the .iso files on your system. This is a fast
query since all of the file names and paths are stored in a
db. if you had 500Gig of drives and did a 
find / -type f | grep "\.iso"
it would take a while. 

jack 



> I set it to run earlier and will see if that 
> helps.  Would there be any ill effects if I didn't run updatedb/slocate?
> 
> Moses
> 
> Kenneth Loafman wrote:
> > On Debian the times for the cron jobs seem to be random between setups. 
> > Check the /etc/crontab for /etc/cron.daily stuff and change the time to 
> > something more convenient.
> > 
> > ...Ken
> > 
> > 
> > Moses McKnight wrote:
> > 
> >> Howdy all,
> >>
> >> I run Debian unstable, and a while back after some upgrade/install the 
> >> hard drive now cranks every morning about 7:30 AM for about 20 minutes 
> >> rendering the computer unusable in the meantime.  I think it's the 
> >> updatedb program updating the database for finding files quickly.  How 
> >> do I turn this off, uninstall it, or at least tell it to run at 1:00 
> >> AM or something?
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >> Moses McKnight
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> https://ntlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
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> > 
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> 
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