shigeki@mediawars.ne.jp wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> This is a strange story. I'm running 1.4C on LC520 with external 1 GB
> HDD. When the clock points to 3:15AM (JST), external HDD (it's running
> NetBSD/mac68k at that time) starts to make a loud noise and system slow
> down. It's daily happening.
> (Don't ask me why I'm waking up so late at night. 'cause I'm a batman.)
> 
> I found this phenomenon when I was a user of 1.3 stable version and it
> happens when NetBSD/mac68k is running. Even if I reinstall system,
> same phenomenon happens :-(
> 
> External HDD is FAST SCSI-2 HDD AV-1000HG and manufacturer is Caravelle
> Dara Systems (But it seems like that this HDD is made by NEC).
> 
> I suspect my explanations isn't good enough but has anyone else ever
> experienced the above ?
> 

3:15am is when cron does its daily run. This is when it produces the
daily report and daily insecurity report that you might have seen in
your inbox (or root's, if you haven't set up /etc/aliases to forward
root's mail to your account). 

One of the things that the daily insecurity report does is use find to
check for setuid/setgid files on your hard drive, necesitating a search
over the whole drive. That's almost defininitely the source of the hard
drive accesses and system slowdown that you noticed.

You can configure a lot of the stuff that it does, look at
/etc/daily.conf and /etc/security.conf , along with the relevant man pages.

-- 
Chris Brown -- Macintosh networking/Web development
<chrsbrwn@mindspring.com> <http://www.mindspring.com/~chrsbrwn>