Monitoring floppy disk access - linux

Tom Phoenix rb-pdx-pm at redcat.com
Wed Jun 5 16:47:39 CDT 2002


On Wed, 5 Jun 2002, Joe Oppegaard wrote:

> I actually wanted to monitor how many hours a drive has been used,

Ah, that's easy: Set up a timer to turn on or off at the same time as the
drive does. Oh, I should specify: a mechanical timer, like the ones used
on, for example, aircraft engines and bulldozers, since they wear by the
hour.

See, it's a hardware problem.... "How many software techs does it take to
change a lightbulb? None; it's a hardware problem." Problem solved. :-)

Seriously, though, I'm sure _somebody_ makes such a timer. But here's
another way to attack the problem without low-level software hackery: Get
a sensor that reports when the power is on (voltage or current sensor,
probably) and attaches to an available port. Then you just write a simple
program that polls the port once per second, or whatever. You should be
able to do that in Perl, I think. Of course, now you're into low-level
_hardware_ hackery. Oh, well!

--Tom

TIMTOWTDI



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