Hi all,
I repurposed my Omnia with a new, external USB3 disk and ran into a strange, reproducible problem. When the disk is formatted with ext4 and mounted, some “ghost process” is writing to it continuously. Mounting the file system is enough to trigger this behaviour. Reformatting the disk with btrfs stops this.
Details:
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I created 2 partitions on the external disk: 1GB for swap, the rest for /srv. I set the configuration and rebooted the router.
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After reboot the router came up properly. Then I noticed the LED was blinking on the external case - something was using the disk continuously.
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Indeed, this is what I could see when I ran iostat:
Device tps kB_read/s kB_wrtn/s kB_read kB_wrtn
sda 4.00 0.00 4096.00 0 4096 -
I checked what processes were using /srv (fuser -c), stopped syslog-ng, but it did not help. Unmounting /dev/sda2 was the only solution.
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Then I remounted /dev/sda2 - the blinking and writing started again.
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I unmounted it, blinking/writing stopped.
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I reformatted /dev/sda2 as btrfs, then mounted it - everything was fine this time!
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I unmounted the disk again, reformatted /dev/sda2 as ext4, mounted again on /mnt (!), the blinking/writing started again.
Does anyone have any ideas what the hell is going on?