I've become somehow annoyed by the too bright, especially at night, Raspberry Pi status lights. Two of my Pis run all the time and I don't want to put them into any closed cases not to overheat them.

As simple as it is to disable the green status LED by issuing (as root):

echo 0 >/sys/class/leds/led0/brightness

the other LEDs controlling LAN status are somehow troublesome. Thankfully, I've come across a small script that does the job.

llctl requires you to install libusb-0.1-4 and libusb-dev to be able to compile it. Just download the file, compile it with

make

and run as root.

The options are:

Usage: llctl r | w<rawvalue> | [ f<mod> ] [ l<mod> ] [ d<mod> ]
r: read content of configuration register other parameters are ignored after 'r' 
w: write <rawvalue> to configuration register (see README) other parameters are ignored after 'w' 
f, l, d select the fast ethernet, link, duplex status 
LED <mod> can be 0, 1, s, t 
0: switch off LED 
1: switch on LED 
s: show status as designed for this LED 
t: toggle LED. 
If LED was set to 's' before, 't' does nothing

So, for example, to turn off ethernet status LED, issue:

sudo ./llctl f0

and watch the light being disabled.

Now, only the red status LED is on, just enough to remind me the Raspberry is still running!