On 26/01/2010 20:03, Jonathan Thornburg wrote:
This needs some tweaking, because sometimes "shutdown" really means
"I want this laptop to shutdown *now* so I can put it in the
padded/insulated carrycase for<insert favorite mode of transport>
without the laptop overheating."
or even
"I want this laptop to shutdown *now* so all encrypted filesystems
are unmounted and inaccessable, and all memory contents safely
decayed, before I go through $COUNTRY customs."
To avoid this sort of problem, IMHO we need a way for a human to tell
the software that "now is an ok time to do system maintainance stuff".
Perhaps a new option to /sbin/shutdown?
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, and also
on a more regular basis *if* it's
not been run early during the morning and the hardware is fast enough.
That covers the cases of
quick information retrieval, urgent hardware swapouts and doesn't annoy
users who leave the
computer on when the job is normally scheduled to run.
PK
