Name

diskseek, diskseekd - disk seek daemon; simulates Messy Dos' drive cleaning effect

Note

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Description

Several people have noticed that Linux has a bad tendency of killing floppy drives. These failures remained completely 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 (actually less if you are running 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 periodically. If it is called as diskseek, the drive is sought only once.

Options

The syntax for diskseekd is as follows:

diskseekd [-d drive] [-i interval] [-p pidfile]

-d drive Selects the drive to seek. By default, drive 0 (\(if/dev/fd0\(is) is sought.

-i interval Selects the cleaning interval, in seconds. If the interval is 0, a

single seek is done. This is useful when calling diskseek from a crontab. The default 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 \(if/var/run/diskseekd.pid\(is.

Bugs

1. Other aspects of Messy Dos' flakiness are not simulated.

2. This section lacks a few smileys.

See Also

Fdutils' texinfo doc