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

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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. CWdiskseekd simulates this effect by seeking the drive periodically. If it is called as CWdiskseek, the drive is seeked only once.

The syntax for CWdiskseekd is as follows:

CWdiskseekd [CW-d driveCW] [CW-i intervalCW] [CW-p pidfileCW]

CW-d driveCW

Selects the drive to seek. By default, drive 0 (CW/dev/fd0) is seeked.

CW-i intervalCW

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 CWdiskseekd and 0 for CWdiskseek.

CW-p pidfileCW

Stores the process id of the diskseekd daemon into pidfile instead of the default CW/var/run/diskseekd.pid.

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Other aspects of Messy Dos' flakiness are not simulated.

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This section lacks a few smileys.

Fdutils' texinfo doc