On 15-Jun-00 at 05:43:35 Nico De Ranter wrote:
> Anyway a Unix box does a lot of things during the night which you do not
> want to have running when you're working on it (e.g. my Linux box insist
> on running a number of finds every time I turn it on >>-().
>
Agreed. Check through /etc/crontab and you'll see things running during the
night - locate and logrotate are two that come to mind. Perhaps not so
important for a PC turned on and off at home, but one left on all the time
probably does want some housekeeping going on. I also have automated
backups of my PC done during the night once a week.
I leave my work PC on 24/7 and my home PC is turned on and off as needed. I
have had no problems with the work PC hardware due to it being left on -
it's an old Apricot LS550 with an older 17" monitor; 1x6GB disk and a 1GB
disk; old 4x (I think) cdrom. The home PC has only had one problem with a
duff memory chip - again an old P200 system; 2GB disk; 2x cdrom; Dell 17"
monitor.
I also, however, tend to work at home in the evenings. As such I can connect
from home through to my PC to obtain any files, etc I need. I can also pick
up my mail from there. E-mail arrives and is stored directly on the PC all
the time from the central mailhub (which has no pop/imap so if I didn't
leave the PC on then I wouldn't be able to get the mail).
Security is an issue with this since the work PC is connected to the local
LAN, and thence to the Internet. I have ipchains filtering stuff out, tcp
wrappers, and use ssh for access from home. There is also a small script run
every day (I think) just to make sure nothing has 'appeared' on the system
which shouldn't have (tripwire would probably be better). Services such as
finger, rsh, etc are obviously not run. It is actually one of the more secure
systems we run :-)
Personally leaving the PC on all the time has being nothing but an
advantage. It has caused no problems, but bear in mind security - someone
hacking into it during the night, and possibly using it to attack other
systems, is not nice.
Historically, BTW, and I'm going back about 16 or 17 years or so, we used to
turn off the Uni's central minicomputer systems at 5pm every day (don't
forget there was no network then (not here anyway); just dumb terminals
cabled directly into ports on the back of the systems). They were left down
all weekend. We were advised by the hardware engineers not to do this (due
to the already mentioned heat problems). Spinning the disks down was also n
ot advised. So since then the computers remain running all the time. I guess
the users nowadays wouldn't like it if we shut them at 5pm anyway...:-)
John.
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John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK Tel: +44 (0)1752 233914
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