Dear all,

In two separate machines, I have mounted a FAT32 partition (one from the
dual-boot PC, one from the removable HD) to each of them running Fedora 7.
Not long after I mounted, I found a lot of empty folders with the name
"orbit-root-...." (where .... are usually numbers) created in my mounted
partitions, and seems they were going on forever. From the name I suppose it
is a software called "orbit" (which does exist when I checked on the
Internet), but I am not sure if it is really the software creating the
folders since when I did a "ps auxw | grep -i orbit", nothing is shown.

Can anyone advice me which software is actually working, what the empty
folders are for and can I remove those folders afterwards? Thanks in
advance!

Best Regards,
LaBird (Benny).
[Email: Remove all underscores from the above email address.]

LaBird wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> In two separate machines, I have mounted a FAT32 partition (one from the
> dual-boot PC, one from the removable HD) to each of them running Fedora 7.
> Not long after I mounted, I found a lot of empty folders with the name
> "orbit-root-...." (where .... are usually numbers) created in my mounted
> partitions, and seems they were going on forever. From the name I suppose it
> is a software called "orbit" (which does exist when I checked on the
> Internet), but I am not sure if it is really the software creating the
> folders since when I did a "ps auxw | grep -i orbit", nothing is shown.
>
> Can anyone advice me which software is actually working, what the empty
> folders are for and can I remove those folders afterwards? Thanks in
> advance!

http://www.gnome.org/projects/ORBit2...85.html#AEN101

It's a library used by gnome2 to get corba, which is used to communicate
between applications. It should just create /tmp/orbit-<username> directories,
but it seems like your gnome2 installation may be a bit f****d.

You won't find orbit running as a process, you will instead se all the gnome2
tools that uses orbit library when you run ps.


--

//Aho

Dear Aho,

"J.O. Aho" <user@example.net> wrote:
>
> http://www.gnome.org/projects/ORBit2...85.html#AEN101
>
> It's a library used by gnome2 to get corba, which is used to communicate
> between applications. It should just create /tmp/orbit-<username>
> directories, but it seems like your gnome2 installation may be a bit
> f****d.
>
> You won't find orbit running as a process, you will instead se all the
> gnome2 tools that uses orbit library when you run ps.
>
>
> --
>
> //Aho

Thanks for your answer. I did a little check myself, and found that the
suspected process that created the directories should be "kjournald". When I
did a "top", "kjournald" seemed to constantly occupy 18-21% of CPU time.

I suppose the problem started when I mount the partitions to the /tmp
directory, where the original set of "orbit-root-..." (and
"orbit-gdm-...") directories were located. When I mounted the partitions,
the original /tmp contents were temporarily hidden, so the program tried to
re-create all the directories on that partition, taking a long long time
(and I was not able to unmount the partition as it was busy, it was even
worse for the removable disk since when I reset the machine after prolonged
wait, I needed to run a chkdsk to repair the file system).

So the lesson learnt for me is: never mount a partition to /tmp.

Best Regards,
LaBird (Benny).

LaBird wrote:

> I suppose the problem started when I mount the partitions to the /tmp
> directory, where the original set of "orbit-root-..." (and
> "orbit-gdm-...") directories were located. When I mounted the partitions,
> the original /tmp contents were temporarily hidden, so the program tried to
> re-create all the directories on that partition, taking a long long time
> (and I was not able to unmount the partition as it was busy, it was even
> worse for the removable disk since when I reset the machine after prolonged
> wait, I needed to run a chkdsk to repair the file system).
>
> So the lesson learnt for me is: never mount a partition to /tmp.

It's always bad to mount something over an existing file hierarchy,
creating a new directory had saved you a lot of trouble. Default RedHat
uses /mnt directory to store mount points for temporary mounts like
cdrom, floppy, usb-memory and so on.


--

//Aho