A few weeks ago, I noticed that there seemed to be a unusual amount of uploading. I tend to monitor upload/download levels with Gnome-System-Monitor due to poor speed levels. Turning off all logical sources of upload/download seemed to make little difference to the traffic levels. I can normally expect from my ADSL connection downloads of up to 700KB/s and uploads of up to 100KB/s. However, due to the ADSL system, high levels of upload seem to have a disproportionate effect on download speeds. Uploading at 100KB/s will drop downloading from 700KB/s to about 40 KB/s! After a while the apparently uncommanded uploads rose to 100KB/s and downloading was virtually impossible. I was unable to ascertain the reason for this behaviour. Disconnecting from the modem/router and reconnecting at a later time, without any action on my part, uploads would begin again, with a delay of anything from about half a minute up to five minutes, but the end result was the same. The same thing happened a couple of years or so, back. On this occasion, disabling the machines operation as an FTP server seemed to solve the problem, the source of which I never discovered. At that time, mainly due to a disk crash which resulted in quite a lot of data being lost, I updated another PC as a stand by machine, and arranged a more effective back-up system.
Getting back to the current problem, I brought up my standby machine to the same state as my normal machine, by file transfer using an independent HDD drive. So now I had two completely identical machines, even to the hardware. The old with the uncommanded upload problem and the standby machine which works fine. Finally, since the old machine, no matter how long I left it unconnected, would always go back to uncommanded uploads, I turned it off.
My usual response to such, is to clear and re-format the OS drive and rebuild from scratch, but with Mga6 looming that didn't seem to be a good idea. I would have brought in up on the forum, but that went down at about the same time. With Mga6rc now available, I shall probably do that, but the problem niggles.
I would like to know the how, the why and the where the problem comes from. It's the sort of thing that I'd expect from MS Windows, but not Linux. Having a working machine, I can leave it to see if anyone can come up with an explanation, before taking down the other, malfunctioning, machine. Soon, I hope, since the malfunctioning machine has a more comfortable chair!