Mageia forum

Hi all:

On a previous post I stated I was fed up with Mageia and going back to Ubuntu.
Since Mageia is such a beautiful system, I decided to give it another shot.
Everything was going fine until yesterday. Out of nowhere something started running
in the background and I could not stop it. It had completely took over my machine.
I had to pull the power cord to get out of it. This started happening after the last update.
I tried using Mageia this morning and after a few minutes it happened again.
I pulled the power cord again. Does anyone know what is going on with that?
I ran COMODO Antivirus and it found nothing.

I would also like to know why Mageia generates so many files. I run Bleachbit many
times a day and sometimes it will show over 600 files to be deleted. I believe Mageia
must be writing files all day long. If I run Bleachbit and delete the files, then run
it again and there are more files to delete. Never seen this before. Is this normal?

If anyone has any thoughts on these problems i would love to hear from you. Thanks!

hardrock wrote:Out of nowhere something started running
in the background and I could not stop it. It had completely took over my machine.
I had to pull the power cord to get out of it.

Next time, see if you can press Ctrl+Alt+F2 and get a text screen.
Log in as root and issue "top" and see what takes CPU. Exit top by pressing q
You can reboot by entering "reboot"

This started happening after the last update.

Good to know.
You are using Mageia 7, I presume.
Which desktop?

I would also like to know why Mageia generates so many files. I run Bleachbit many
times a day and sometimes it will show over 600 files to be deleted. I believe Mageia
must be writing files all day long. If I run Bleachbit and delete the files, then run
it again and there are more files to delete. Never seen this before. Is this normal?

I have never needed any cleaning program and i have been using Mandriva/Mageia 13 years now...
What files is it this program want to clean away? Browser caches, temporary files etc?
Such will take care of itself.

Hi @hardrock - I took a look at your other posts to get some idea of what could be happening.
This is just an educated guess - If you are running an older computer with not much RAM, what can be happening is that the computer starts using SWAP space to cache RAM. Also, if you are running a harddrive, you will very-much notice the slow down (SSD to a lesser extent), and it feels like you were driving a Ferrari car at high speed and then all of a sudden slowed down to walking speed. Mouse and keyboard can become very sluggish and slow.

One of the processes that run by default is Mageia checking itself to see if you need updates. This process starts about 5 minutes after you login. If you go to the {Mageia Control Center -> Software Management -> Configure update frequency}, you can adjust it from 5minutes after login to as far back as 30minutes, and 24hr periodic rate.
Please let us know what model of computer, and how much RAM it has. Note a laptop video display will subtract from available RAM too.

Hi morgano:

The problem with something taking over my machine has been traced to the last updates I received
last Sunday. At least that is what it seems to be. Whenever dealing with a new syatem I always back
up my complete system using Redo. Then if I have a major problem it takes only a few minutes to restore
it back to where it was. I hope that problem has been resolved.

I tried the Ctl-Alt-F2 as you mentioned. The cmgdaemon was using 10% of the CPU. This daemon is
associated with the COMODO Antivirus I am using. Guess I will have to continue dealing with that.
Is their a way to return to the Desktop after pressing the 'q' key to exit the text screen?

OK, now on to the constant writing to the HDD I am having with Mageia 7. I did a test first thing this
morning. After booting the machine and sitting idle for 15 minutes connected to WIFI Mageia generated
40.5 Megs with 448 files for Bleachbit to delete. After deleting those files, I did another test. In 10 minutes
sitting idle Mageia generated 30.4 Megs with 172 files to remove. It appears Mageia loves to write files to
the HDD. What is the reason for this and how can I stop this from happening? I have to run Bleachbit every
few minutes to delete these files.

I have also noticed that disconnected from the Internet the light NEVER blinks showing Mageia is NOT
writing to the HDD! Is Mageia spying on its users? Just a thought. Have a great day!

Hi JoesCat:

I am running a Dell Lattitude D630 Laptop, Dual Core at 2 GigaHertz with 3 GigaBytes of Ram.
I agree with what you posted but I have not had any problems with other versions of Linux as
far as performance. It does seem that 64 bit causes some problems with the way some software
works. For instance, I was never able to install the Allegro libraries so I had to give up programming
on Mageia. I tried for days to get it installed but something was always missing. It seems to be
somewhat difficult to install certain software on Mageia. I work between 4 different versions of Linux
depending on what I am doing. With this style of computer I can switch operating systems in a flash.
Both the D620 and D630 are commercial computers and very durable. I have both among others.
See my reply above to morgano. Have a great day!

hardrock wrote: I tried the Ctl-Alt-F2 as you mentioned. The cmgdaemon was using 10% of the CPU. This daemon is
associated with the COMODO Antivirus I am using. Guess I will have to continue dealing with that.
Is their a way to return to the Desktop after pressing the 'q' key to exit the text screen?

You can return to your desktop session via Ctl-Alt-F1 if that's what you're asking for.

Regarding "something taking over the machine", this can be swap related even when you have quite a lot of RAM.

I am writing this post on a machine with 8GB of RAM but lightweight processor (it is designed for minimal power use as it is on all the time). However, on occasion it can still behave like it has been taken over. If you are running memory-intensive applications (the classic for this in my case is several Firefox sessions on each of two concurrent users with multiple tabs on each session) you can occupy all the memory surprisingly quickly, and the machine then spends all its time swapping - so much so that it takes seconds to recognise when one character has been typed in a console. The machine in question has a very slow disk write speed, though reads are fast, so it becomes unusable once swapping starts.

"top" is again the program to see what's going on (although you don't need to be root to run it). When it is going very slowly, in the "MiB Mem:" row, look for "used" being similar to "total", and on the "MiB Swap:" row a non-zero value of "used".

If you are out of memory and the machine has "gone slow", use the process list in "top" to spot a memory hog. Record its PID, exit top, and then kill the process. You may have to use kill -9 as the swapping may prevent the close dialogue working. However, this is much less nasty than pulling the mains plug.

If your machine is bad at swapping, you can configure it not to swap at all, but I found this very annoying as I wouldn't then be able to predict which process got automatically killed when I ran out of RAM.

Please bear in mid that a D630 is 12 year old technology so is slow compared with modern expectations - I have other laptops of similar age which cannot handle swapping.

Re the continuous writing to disk, the most likely reason for this is that there is something wrong which is causing regular updates to a log file. Please let us know example names of these files that you are deleting. You could also try "dmesg" - you may have a problem which is causing almost continual writing to the journal, and dmesg is likely to indicate the issue.

Re your issue with installing the Allegro library, I presume you mean the Allegro game programming library? If so, it may be worth making a separate post regarding this. I am not using it in anger at present but I do have it installed on this machine, just by ticking the box in the software installer. Both x86_84 and i586 versions are in the repos.

I have been using Mandrake->Mageia for 16 years now and have never seen unexplained disk access. I find it the easiest to use of the several Linux distros I use every day, albeit that it can be difficult sometimes to install software which is not in the repos because truly compatible rpms are not available.

There is a background scan called Msec. I deactivated it because my hard drive rattles when it's active and it really bugged me. Maybe that's the thing running in your background, too? You can deactivate it in the Mageia Control Center (MCC) under "Security / Configuration of system security...".

The paths of the files would be interesting. Could you post them?

hardrock wrote:Hi JoesCat:

I am running a Dell Lattitude D630 Laptop, Dual Core at 2 GigaHertz with 3 GigaBytes of Ram. I agree with what you posted but I have not had any problems with other versions of Linux as far as performance. It does seem that 64 bit causes some problems with the way some software works. For instance, I was never able to install the Allegro libraries so I had to give up programming on Mageia. I tried for days to get it installed but something was always missing. It seems to be somewhat difficult to install certain software on Mageia. I work between 4 different versions of Linux depending on what I am doing. With this style of computer I can switch operating systems in a flash. Both the D620 and D630 are commercial computers and very durable. I have both among others.
See my reply above to morgano. Have a great day!

Your laptop is very durable but still it's old technology. Since then, Dell has produced other models that are also very durable and obviously more up to date and you can definitely pick up a refurbished model like a Dell Latitude.

Now you may have to go along with some adjustments. Since you have less than 4GB of RAM, you can use the 32bit version. And a lighter desktop environment instead of plasma or gnome. So I suggest you download the 32bit XFCE live media and see if it runs better. Alternatively you can try MATE or LXQT if you use the classical installation media.

MSEC mentioned before might also take up some resources but you can always set it up according to your needs. Actually I think it's more useful than the Comodo software you are using.

In Firefox, install Noscript or a similar plugin so that only allowed sites can run javascript. Less CPU and RAM useage in this way and better security as well.

morgano wrote:I have never needed any cleaning program and i have been using Mandriva/Mageia 13 years now...
What files is it this program want to clean away? Browser caches, temporary files etc?
Such will take care of itself.

Bleachbit is more like a security utility. It became famous when a politician's administrator used it to delete (successfully) incriminating evidence. It can delete browser caches and temporary files, wipe files and so on. On a typical Linux system, it can delete things like thumbnails, thunderbird cache and cookies, most recently used files for vlc or libreoffice, system history and logs.

3GB of RAM is pretty marginal for a modern full-up Linux distro - any modern full-up Linux distro. I think the idea that your system is bogging down due to swapping is a very credible idea.

If you are running KDE/Plasma or Gnome for your desktop, you are almost certain to run out of RAM at some point. You can monitor this using the GUI tool ksysguard or the CLI tools free, vmstat, top, and iotop (among others). I suggest you become familiar with those tools.

For comparison, my laptop uses an 8 core i7 processor and has 16 GB of memory. It runs OpenSUSE Leap 15 with the KDE desktop and all the toys. When I start it up it uses about 3GB of RAM and, as I use it, that usage increases steadily.

Nine years ago, I had a 4 GB system that I had just assembled, and it ran 32 bit Mandriva 10 with KDE. Mandriva 10 fit in that memory space back then, and I could even load 1 virtual machine ( as long as it was a small one) without things getting too bad, though it did become swappy. I very quickly upgraded to 8 GB because I just didn't have enough RAM. And that was 9 years ago. Systems are much bigger now.

As for comodo antivirus, I didn't even know they had a Linux product. I wouldn't use it on my system; with proper security protocols you don't need it and what you describe seems to suggest a rather heavy footprint on your system. DISCLOSURE: the company I am contracted to (I am a principal in that company and part owner) has a partnership agreement with Comodo that THEY sought with us. We sell their Unified Threat Management cloud product as part of an options bundle with our product.

I do have ClamAV running on my system, and periodically I look at it and think that I don't need it and probably should remove it. However, I have plenty of resources and I tend to follow a rather paranoid computing model anyway and it isn't really hurting anything and might someday even help. So it is running.

As for all the files being written, I will offer no opinion without more information (like: "what files, exactly?"). It is entirely likely, however, that Mageia is caching information that it uses routinely and, when you delete that cache, Mageia immediately starts to rebuild it. You will find a lot of stuff in /var that fits this profile.

If I were you, I would become a lot less aggressive about using bleachbit. Let the system set itself up the way it wants to.

So, in summary, my recommendations:

1. If you can increase your RAM, do so.

Failing that:

2. Switch to a lightweight desktop

In any case:

3. Ditch the Comodo Antivirus
4. Stop using bleachbit all the time. If you need the disk space, use it from time to time to clean up browser caches and, perhaps, to remove personal information you don't want to persist (such as recently opened documents).

Do these things, and I think you will find Mageia to be a good experience on that old machine.

To all that have replied:

When I start a new system and get it where I can use it I always create a backup image
of my HDD. If I encounter a problem it takes less than 20 minutes to install the image. When I had
the problem with something taking over my machine I believe it was from the updates I received on 12-8.
Since then I have avoided all updates from Mageia and it has not happened since. I realize this is a big
mistake but you do what you have to do.

Now for using COMODO Antivirus:
I have used it for many years. Since I have been using Mageia I have received 6 threats. This is what
the Antivirus found: Exploit.JS.Pdfka.PIQ@281000067. It was found in the python 2 and 3 subdirectories.
I did a search but the website was in a foreign language. Upon scanning the page one word in English was
found: MALWARE. Maybe its nothing but maybe if someone could check it out.

Now to Mageia writting all thes files to my HDD:
Most all of the files are being written to the .cache and .mozzila hidden directories. I mean hundreds of files
per day. Wish I could stop all these and the log files also.

I know the D620 and D630 are old machines, but they have served me well for over ten years. Never had a
problem. There is something different about Mageia that I have not encountered with other Linux versions. I
have only been using Mageia for a little over a month but I keep plugging along. I did disable MSEC to see if
it will make a difference. I got Opengl working this morning and I am very happy about that. Even the 3D
Acceleration is excellent on this machine. I hate I could never get Allegro loaded but I will keep at it.
I have found installing certain software on Mageia can be a nightmare. I would like to make one more comment
and I will quit: I installed bleachbit from Mageia Repository. A message came up that it could be updated to
version 3.0. I tried and an error was reported. This happens all the time with Mageia. How did I get it installed?
I downloaded the ,deb file for Ubuntu 18.10, converted it with alien to rpm and It installed perfectly.
Thanks to everyone that replied and have a great day!!!!!!

Your COMODO was worth it here:
I replaced the dot with a space, and google offered several sites describing "Exploit JS.Pdfka.PIQ@281000067"
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/threats/malware-encyclopedia-description?Name=Exploit:JS/Pdfjsc.Z&threatId=-2147313596
Exploit:JS/Pdfjsc.Z is an obfuscated JavaScript often distributed through compromised websites. It is designed to exploit several vulnerabilities in the web browser.

This is a problem since the linux "Adobe" pdf reader is a bit stale for Linux.
Also recommend keeping a fairly up to date Firefox and Chrome, and as mentioned earlier NoScript is probably a good suggestion to avoid 3rd party opportunities for infection. Javascript has it's good and bad points, and when you look at the source code for websites, many of the popular ones import files from many places beyond the host site.

For the large number of files in the mozilla directory, you may want to look through the FireFox preferences and see if there is anything you may want to adjust. Konqueror allows you to reduce the cache size. As for the large number of files, it's the way the world is going, you enter a website and you get a barrage of off-site links, advertising, video, etc, etc, etc. Websites today aren't what you had 10 years ago.

If you are running very tight for space, you might want to try run strip in /usr/* , it might be like scraping paint off the walls to gain an extra minuscule amount of extra floor space on your drive. Disadvantage is lack of debug crash info.

If you're satisfied with the solution, can you retitle the subject with [solved] or some other similar extra message.