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cfgauss
l33t
Joined: 18 May 2005
Posts: 726
Location: USA
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 Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2008 12:27 am Post subject: [SOLVED] Flashing HDD LED and hal |
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I built a new box and, much to my dismay, the hard disk drive LED, normally blue, flashes red about once a second. Google suggested that the flashing LED didn't represent hard drive activity but rather SATA activity. (I have a SATA hard drive and two SATA cdroms.) Sure enough, that was the case.
| Code: | # ps aux | grep hal
...
root 11118 0.0 0.0 17632 1080 ? S 19:19 0:00 hald-addon-storage: polling /dev/sr0 (every 2 sec)
root 11121 0.0 0.0 17632 1068 ? S 19:19 0:00 hald-addon-storage: polling /dev/sr1 (every 2 sec)
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Evidently hal is polling the cdroms for inserted media. When I
| Code: | gauss:~# /etc/init.d/hald stop
* Stopping Hardware Abstraction Layer daemon ...
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the LED is a constant blue. So, I have two questions.
Even though the LED activity is "harmless", do I lose anything if I remove hald from the default runlevel? If I remove hald from world?
When hald is not running, will LED activity reflect hard drive or "all SATA devices" activity?
Thanks.
[SOLVED] See my second post, below. [/SOLVED]
Last edited by cfgauss on Thu Oct 16, 2008 4:25 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Lucractius
n00b
Joined: 04 Jul 2005
Posts: 43
Location: Australia
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| Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2008 5:05 am Post subject: |
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I'm curious to know if the polling period can be throttled back since the behavior is useful.
But obviously side effects such as this need a solution.
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pappy_mcfae
Watchman
Joined: 27 Dec 2007
Posts: 5999
Location: Pomona, California.
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| Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2008 6:39 am Post subject: |
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Yes, you lose the ability to automount using most popular (and some not-so-popular) desktop and window managers, such as XFCE and KDE. You also lose X functionality, as the mouse and keyboard are being switched from using modules to using the hal/dbus system. You also set yourself back technologically speaking.
To give up full functionality for an LED seems a complete waste of your system. Why sacrifice for a cosmetic doo-dad you will hardly ever notice if you're doing anything with your system that requires you to take your attention off the hard drive light, and focus it on the screen? That just seems a bit silly to me.
But hey, if that's what you want to do, knock yourself out. The command would be:
Blessed be!
Pappy
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IvanMajhen
Guru
Joined: 10 Jun 2006
Posts: 392
Location: Croatia
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| Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2008 9:50 am Post subject: |
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You can disable polling
| Code: | | hal-disable-polling -- device /dev/sr0 |
and add cdrom mount options to fstab, and then add desktop shortcut to device. |
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cfgauss
l33t
Joined: 18 May 2005
Posts: 726
Location: USA
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| Posted: Thu Oct 16, 2008 4:24 am Post subject: |
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| IvanMajhen wrote: | You can disable polling
| Code: | | hal-disable-polling -- device /dev/sr0 |
and add cdrom mount options to fstab, and then add desktop shortcut to device. |
Thanks. This works.
The man page for hal-disable-polling states, "It is the position of the HAL team that polling should be avoided at all costs as long as it doesn't heavily impact the user experience in a negative way." So far I've not noticed any negative effects, at least not with this kernel. |
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