[SpecMode]

Seems to me, if you kill syslog, wouldn't it prevent applications and system processes from updating logfiles (console.log, system.log, et al)?

I doubt it would kill OS X, but without up-to-date logfiles it can make troubleshooting further issues a bit more difficult.

[Wickers]

well and it will cause apps that use syslog to get a bit buggy. . .

I'll turn this over to the OSX guys here... I'm no expert in Darwin and OSX's relations.

[SpecMode]

Huh...being the guinea pig that I am, I decided to try killing syslogd myself.

Surprise, surprise: it restarts automatically. So much for that plan...

[Wickers]

Well there you go... he I am with my linux box and all I have to do to disable the process from starting on boot is '#chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.syslog'. . . a quick reboot and no more syslog. (note this might only work on slackware linux or slackware based distros.)

So in the end, it's an OSX config thing. . . might have to find a work around for it.

[SpecMode]

Seeing as OS X is BSD-based...wouldn't the same thing work in this case, or at least with a slight modification?

I'm not that much of a guinea pig; one of y'all will have to try this yourself.

[Wickers]

Now that I think about it, Slackware takes after the BSD style init system. . . so you might have the same file names and directories in /etc/rc.d/.

Now the question would be just how 'connected' are the two. I know that all the init scripts in rc.d are, are just shell scripts in slackware's case. So if it is the same in OSX, then just making them not able to exec' would stop the script from running at startup. Now this is also guessing that the script is called by its name, not #sh script.sh, which will run the script regardless.

On a side note, when you killed off the syslog deamon... how did you do it?
#killall syslogd 2> /dev/null
Try this and see if it puts it under for good.

[SpecMode]

Hrm...tried your suggestion, got the same result.

In my previous attempts, I used a couple different methods ('killall syslogd' and 'killall -9 syslogd'), neither of which killed the process permanently.

[stevegong]

try finding the syslog file (script or whatever) and rename it to something like syslog.disabled and then kill it. It won't be able to find the syslog script so it will never respawn.

Hi I have this ticking HD, Funny thing is mine only appeared after i formatted and installed Tiger, now i cant get rid of it, even if i reinstall Panther it still does it, I tried the Sudo Killall update but mine still does it,

How do i find out what processes are running.? I am very new to the Mac OS

Thanks

I have the same issue on my brand new 17" PB. It is driving me crazy. I also tried the sudo kill with no change. Any help on killing this annoying tick would be appreciated.

Ok, I opened Activity Monitor and Force Quit the update process. Silence! Anyone know if this will cause any issues?

[stevegong]

Originally Posted by CobraNT Ok, I opened Activity Monitor and Force Quit the update process. Silence! Anyone know if this will cause any issues?

that's only temporary, there's a whole sea of processes you'd have to kill.

I had the same problem after update to Tiger, i discovered in console that there was an attempt to print something,prob something didnt go right during Tiger install, that failed and it would repeat trying to do it again every 30seconds or so.
After removing the printer setup and adding it again the noise is gone and my laptop's hd will spindown again

I have discovered ticking problem on my PowerBook and OS X 10.4.2 since I replaced my broken IBM travelstar 4200RPM hdd for Samsung MP0603H 5400RPM. Also it is possible that this problem existed even before but I haven't be able to hear ticking because of travelstar hdd being much more noisy then Samsung.

Nevertheless, this every 30 seconds hdd ticking started to piss me off and fortunately I found this thread and started to experiment.

I didn't kill update process instead I changed its interval in /etc/rc:
For example:
/usr/sbin/update
to
/usr/sbin/update 1800 1800

1800 time in seconds;
now update syncs every 30 minutes and according to fs_usage its writes much more data in single pass' sometimes sync process takes around 2-3 seconds. But during 'every 30 seconds' sync I have never seen it to took longer than 1 second and sometimes there were no data at all(no WrData/ WrMeta lines under sync line)

[PKIDelirium]

I just did a sudo killall update on my iBook... This won't lead to problems will it?

I scrolled the previous pages but my brain almost melted from all the techno-babble

[cmeyer42]

(i've only read pgs 1 and 3 of this thread)
Hey, could it be dashboard? who knows what widget is trying to update itself like the clock or some search tool. I myself turned Dashboard off because it made my PB"17 hot enough to make coffee!!
(and no i'm not anti-dashboard!)

[stevegong]

Ok, so it's been a year now. Have there been any developments regarding this?

I guess I've gotten used to the idea of waking up and having a warm computer. I still miss the good ol days though.

Who knows, maybe in a few months my hdd will crap out.

[Brad]

Sadly, no.