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NAME

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

SYNOPSIS

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

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 (less when 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 seeked only once.

OPTIONS

-d drive
Selects the drive to seek. By default, drive 0 is seeked.
-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 /var/run/diskseekd.pid.

BUGS

1. Other aspects of Messy Dos' flakiness are not simulated. 2. This manpage lacks a few smileys.

FILES

/dev/fd* - Floppy devices

AUTHOR

Alain Knaff, Alain.Knaff@inrialpes.fr

SEE ALSO

superformat(1), getfdprm(1), floppycontrol(1), fdrawcmd(1)


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