Keeping system up to date
Hi Developers,
I mailed this message earlier to the list but from another
account. Perhaps this is why I got no response. Please ignore the
previous message: I added a little to the previous message because I
noticed that my suggestion wasn't ok in a few points.
I would like to keep my system up to date (don't we all) but I don't
have it up and running 24 hours a day. Actually it is my home system
and when I'm not working on something it is switched off. When I'm
working on it I want good performance. When I'm not working on
something I don't want it to polute the environment by consuming more
energy than necessary and I switch off my system. This is a habit of a
lot of people, especially those with a system at home and roots in
dos/windo/os2/"whatever not unix".
Does anyone know a way to solve this?
I was thinking of the following:
* Queueing the cronjobs and running them ``nicely'' on the system,
instead of giving them toppriority as it seems to be the case now.
Filling this queue should be done every minute (when the system is
running) and *very important* at boot time.
* The boot time queue filling should check for the last time the queue
was filled (that's the last time before the system was switched
off/went down) and check if any cronjobs should have been started
since that time.
* Unfinished jobs or jobs which haven't been taken up and queued for
execution again should not be added to the queue because this doesn't
seem usefull.
* A few options might need to be included about how to execute
specific jobs. Some jobs are time-critical (mirror jobs), some are not
(most others?). The time-critical ones should be treated like they
normally would (with higher priority). These options can be specified
on a comment line in the scripts in /etc/cron.{daily,weekly,monthly}.
* When powering the system down and a job is still running it should
be called for execution (a little morbid) the next time the system is
powered up.
I don't know how run-parts workes right now and if it can be modified
to do a few parts of the above described. The queue filling thing at
boot time should (?) be done by cron. Please suggest other things if
you think I overlooked something (hmm, this will fill my mailbox).
Erick
--
Erick Branderhorst@heel.fgg.eur.nl +31-10-4635142
Department of General Surgery (Intensive Care) University Hospital Rotterdam NL
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