Re: way to help: laptops and weekly

[Bofh (Peter Kay)]

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 forinsert 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

Re: boot disk ???

[Bofh (Peter Kay)]

PJ wrote:


It really pisses me off that everyone assumes that the poor sap who is
asking for help is too stupid to have done things right and they just
forget that maybe the problem is in the SOURCE !
I know what a bootable image usually looks like... but neither of those
I downloaded look right.
Seeing as only last Thursday I downloaded a 4.5 i386 CD, burnt it using 
Infrarecorder (Windows)  and booted it without any problems you might 
see why some people are a little doubtful of your claims, particularly 
as you seem all too ready to run back to FreeBSD. If this is a troll, 
it's a very poor one.


Still, if you have some weirdly quirky hardware, there's still the boot 
floppies or netbooting bsd.rd. All of those work well and you should try 
them if the CD fails.


It's also possible to stick it on USB flash, or boot up a VM and run the 
CD or any of the alternative methods in that. Those will all prove it 
boots with little problem and that we don't need to hack the bootloader 
on with a very small magnet.


If the downloaded image looked 'odd' you should check out SGI boot CDs 
(for any OS) - now *that's* odd.


PK