diskseekd
Hurricane Electric Internet Services
NAME
diskseek, diskseekd - disk seek daemon; simulates Messy
Dos' drive cleaning effect
SYNOPSIS
diskseekd [-d drive] [-i interval] [-p pidfile]
DESCRIPTION
Several people have noticed that Linux has a bad tendency
of killing floppy drives. These failures remained com-
pletely mysterious, until somebody noticed that they were
due to huge layers of dust accumulating in the floppy
drives. This cannot happen under Messy Dos, because this
excuse for an operating system is so unstable that it
crashes roughly every 20 minutes (less when you are run-
ning Windows). When rebooting, the BIOS seeks the drive,
and by doing this, it shakes the dust out of the drive
mechanism.
diskseekd simulates this effect by seeking the drive peri-
odically. If it is called as diskseek, the drive is
seeked only once.
OPTIONS
-d drive
Selects the drive to seek. By default, drive 0
(/dev/fd0) is seeked.
-i interval
Selects the cleaning interval, in seconds. If the
interval is 0, a single seek is done. This is use-
ful when calling diskseek from a crontab. The de-
fault is 1000 seconds (about 16 minutes) for
diskseekd and 0 for diskseek.
-p pidfile
Stores the process id of the diskseekd daemon into
pidfile instead of the default
/var/run/diskseekd.pid.
BUGS
1. Other aspects of Messy Dos' flakiness are not simulat-
ed. 2. This manpage lacks a few smileys.
FILES
/dev/fd* - Floppy devices
AUTHOR
Alain Knaff, Alain.Knaff@inrialpes.fr
SEE ALSO
superformat(1), getfdprm(1), floppycontrol(1), fdrawcmd(1)
Hurricane Electric Internet Services
Copyright (C) 1998
Hurricane Electric.
All Rights Reserved.