I wont trick you...i know very little, but a senior was helping me the other day and showed me it. sar - Possibly one of the most useful (and vexing) commands you can use to monitor a system, System Activity Reporter gathers the specified information from the system on a scheduled basis and builds logfiles that you can then report on or mine specific timeframes to see what was going on between a set of time ticks. You can monitor many things with sar, including: file access routines, buffer activity, system call activity, block device activity, paging and much more. http://schogini.us/wordpress/index.php/2005/11/01/useful-linux-performance-u... http://www.remote-dba.net/unix_linux/monitoring_commands.htm Using lvm? http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl8_lvmsar.htm http://oklinux.org/oracle/Oracle9i_by_guppy.txt ----- Original Message ---- From: "kstratton@fastmail.us" <kstratton@fastmail.us> To: Worcester Linux Users Group <wlug@mail.wlug.org>; Worcester Linux Users Group <wlug@mail.wlug.org> Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2007 9:58:15 AM Subject: Re: [Wlug] System diagnostics Could you provide more information abdout "sar"? I tried wikipedia.com, and on my system: man, info, apropos and emerge (a gentoo distribution tool) for "sar". I did not find anything I thought was relevant.... On Fri, 14 Sep 2007 15:18:22 -0700 (PDT), "Mike Leo" <mleo963@yahoo.com> said:

I learned about "sar" last night due to a server outage...check it out.

I think it will server your purpose

----- Original Message ---- From: Andy Stewart <andystewart@comcast.net> To: Worcester Linux Users Group <wlug@mail.wlug.org> Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 5:42:55 PM Subject: Re: [Wlug] System diagnostics

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Michael Long wrote:

...

Hi All,

I just install Ubuntu 6.06 lts. With the box up and running it appears that there is disk activity because the light on the case is active. However running top shows the box is basically idle (CPU < 1%) and "ps aux" shows nothing unusual. I do not claim to be a sys admin however so I may not be interpreting things correctly. The fans seem to be working harder than before as well.

What command line tools should I be looking at determine the health of the machine and drives. The os is on an IDE drive and I have a raid (MegaRAID) for the other drive.

I know this is a bit vague but I am not sure where to start. I have been using opensuse but now I do not have x or the other tools that come bundled with kde.

Thanks, Mike

HI Mike,

Here's what I would try:

a) Are you sure that the disk activity light on the case is properly wired to your MB? Is the light constantly on, or does it flicker?

b) unplug the network cable to insure that the disk activity isn't caused by something on the network

c) If you are sufficiently patient and wait, does the activity stop (say in 5-10 minute)?

d) What happens if you run "tail -f /var/log/messages" as root ? Lots of messages here could cause disk activity.

I'm sure other folks with have other ideas, but that's my 2cents, devalued for inflation.

HTH,

Andy

- -- Andy Stewart, Founder Worcester Linux Users' Group (http://www.wlug.org) Chelmsford Linux Meetup Group (http://linux.meetup.com/393) Amateur Radio: KB1OIQ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with SUSE - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

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