[H-GEN] rebooting system

[Benjamin]

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Richard wrote:
> I access my linux box remotely only (no monitor, keyboard or mouse attached)
> and I was just wondering if there's a way to get my system to automatically
> reboot once a week (at some ungodly hour of the night when I should be in
> bed)? Even better, is it possible for it to only reboot if no one is using
> it?

If you want something done periodically, your best bet is cron. As root 
type "crontab -e". See the cron and crontab man pages for more info. 
Some trivial scripting should be able to check whether any users are 
logged on before the automatic reboot.

As an aside, is there any particular reason you want to do this? It's 
generally considered bad karma to reboot a unix machine just for the 
hell of it ;) If there's a problem that you're trying to address, 
perhaps it could be addressed in an alternative way.

Interestingly I've seen windows[1] used in some mission-critical 
environments with a two machine main-backup combination. Of course the 
windows machines could not run for long periods of time without running 
into problems, so once a week the server currently controlling the 
system was rebooted as a "failover test". The backup took control, the 
main got its operating system's state refereshed to time 0, and the 
system remained fairly reliable :)

Benjamin
[1] Typically quite old and well understood windows revisions


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