Puzzling hard drive behavior

[Larzp]

Hello everyone-

I am running a dual boot Win98/Knoppix machine, using Knoppix 99% of the time. I have a cable broadband connection to the Internet via a Linksys router doing DHCP connections to 4 machines in my home. My Knoppix partition is formatted as Ext3. My hard drive is doing something funky, and I would like to know if anyone can explain it. Every morning at exactly 7:46AM, the drive light gets very active and I can hear the drive thrashing for about 3 to 4 minutes, even when I am not running any programs. Could this be some automatic thing Knoppix or Ext3 does to defrag the disk (I've looked for settings but can't find any), or is there something more troublesome going on through my cable connection? I don't know much about spyware, etc. on Linux/Knoppix. Is there some way I can monitor outgoing traffic during this period?

Thanks in advance for any help anyone has - take care.

Lars

[eco2geek]

First, check /etc/crontab and see if it's set to run the scripts in /etc/cron.daily at or around that time. (Type "man 5 crontab" for an explanation of the fields.)

[Cuddles]

Good advice Eco2Geek,

If something is running, and you know you didn't start something, it "usually" is something that is "task scheduled" - If you have a windows install, and something "starts" - especially at a specific time - it probably is running in "Task Scheduler", as far as I know, in Knoppix, or even Unix for that matter, Cron has to be the culprit...

BTW -=- Thanks Eco2Geek for reminding me, get my cron running. Now that v3.4 is up and happy, time to get all those "auto-housekeeping" programs running

Ms. Cuddles