evil, undocumented, periodic, little critters in GNOME

[Andy Kahn <ackahn netapp com>]

I recall seeing an email thread about this a couple of months ago, but
the exact subject escapes me.

Basically, after a new installation of various helix GNOME bits on a
RedHat 6.2 system, I noticed that every ten seconds or so, my hard
drive light would go on, indicating some periodic disk activity.

I tracked it down to a daemon called "magicdev", and with no surprise,
it had no man page.  Fortunately(?), the RPM information was
available:

Name        : magicdev                     Relocations: (not relocateable)
Version     : 0.2.7                             Vendor: Red Hat, Inc.
Release     : 1                             Build Date: Wed 08 Mar 2000 02:45:53 PM PST
Install date: Mon 10 Jul 2000 02:29:59 PM PDT      Build Host: porky.devel.redhat.com
Group       : Applications/System           Source RPM: magicdev-0.2.7-1.src.rpm
Size        : 46217                            License: GPL
Packager    : Red Hat, Inc. <http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla>
Summary     : A GNOME daemon for automatically mounting/playing CDs.
Description :
Magicdev is a daemon that runs within the GNOME environment and
detects when a CD is removed or inserted. Magicdev handles running
autorun programs on the CD, updating the File Manager and playing
audio CDs.


Taking a wild guess, I reasoned it was behaving like a Windows system
would, and stupidly trying to mount the cdrom drive.  So I went into
the control-center settings, and turned off the "automatically mount"
option for cd's.  Bingo.

This binary should have a man page, and so should a lot of other
binaries that GNOME conveniently adds as a virus, err, helper.
--andy