"Bofh (Peter Kay)" <syllopsium () syllopsium ! com> suggested > System maintenance, IMO, should be invisible to the user unless it > requires input. Shutdown is > a poor time to run maintenance because it's (probably) run more often > when something needs to > be done to the machine or the user has to go somewhere in a hurry. > > I like the ideas of running it say half an hour after startup,
You mean right in the middle of an hour-long presentation whose movies don't really play fast enough as it is? Ick. A few days ago I had to give a presentation using a laptop running Windows 95 (my OpenBSD laptop can't seem to do external video output properly, and I've been too busy to track down the problem or file a proper bug report). Every 10-15 minutes during the talk, a window would pop up saying that the system was about to update virus definitions, and giving me 15 seconds or so to click the "go away, don't bother me now" button. This sort of experience is *not* one that I'd like to repeat under OpenBSD... Some of the /etc/weekly stuff (eg rebuilding locatedb) involves walking all (non-NFS) mounted filesystems, so it really eats disk seek bandwidth, i.e., it makes the machine painfully slow for most other use while it's running. So, only a human can decide when a good "quiet" time is to run the disk-cruncher. No automatic scheme can avoid being at a bad time occasionally for some users. So, what's needed is a cron with flexible-enough specification semantics (a.k.a. "crontab on steroids") so a human can tell cron what the ok-to-run times are. Alas, I am *not* vounteering to write such a program at this time (way too much "life" happening already), so in the OpenBSD spirit, I hereby forfeit any rights-to-complain-loudly that I might otherwise have had. ciao, -- -- "Jonathan Thornburg [remove -animal to reply]" <jth...@astro.indiana-zebra.edu> Dept of Astronomy, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA "If the triangles made a god, it would have three sides." -- Voltaire
