Today, seemingly at random, I noticed that my hard disk was being accessed constantly, with the light solid on. I looked at the running processes and found “kjournald” and “syslog-ng” are in “disk sleep”. I reboot the computer, and when I log in, the disk is normal again. I look at the processes and there is nothing "disk sleep"ing. Nothing is taking up any unusual processor time, even when the disk assault commences. Suddenly, about 3 minutes after rebooting, it starts again. I’m on the third reboot and still it happened again.
Any clues? Anything I can do to figure out what is going on? I’m on 11.1 x86_64. I did not update any software today. Yesterday I believe I installed a new version of gstreamer, but after that I didn’t have this behavior. Thanks for the help.
Thanks for the replies. They actually helped me solve the problem, though I probably should have been able to on my own. :shame:
When I read the replies, I got to looking at the various stuff in /var/log since syslog-ng was one of the offending processes, and found in my cups error_log that the cups hp backend was crashing and “with status 1”. Well, not too helpful (although it did say ‘Hint: Try setting the LogLevel to “debug” to find out more.’ However, I don’t know where this particular LogLevel is to be set) At any rate, some tooling around with HPLIP discovered some weird orphaned job sitting in my printer queue, once I deleted that, the cups backend stopped crashing, and the assaulting of my disk has ended! Huzzah.