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 com-
       pletely 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  run-
       ning  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 peri-
       odically.  If it is  called  as  diskseek,  the  drive  is
       seeked only once.

OPTIONS

       -d drive
              Selects  the  drive  to  seek.  By default, drive 0
              (/dev/fd0) is seeked.
       -i interval
              Selects the cleaning interval, in seconds.  If  the
              interval  is 0, a single seek is done. This is use-
              ful when calling diskseek from a crontab.  The  de-
              fault  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  simulat-
       ed.  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)