Overnight shutdown?

I just bought a new iMac, running 10.3. I was using 9.2 previously. For the twenty years I've owned Macs, I've been shutting them down at night. But I've heard that the Unix system underlying OSX needs to do overnight maintenance and so you need to keep the machine running. Is this true? If so, is there a way to access the maintenance routines and schedule them when you want them to run? Any info about this will be appreciated.

Thanks.

In article 250320042057515289%mdintenfass@redacted.invalid, Mark Dintenfass mdintenfass@redacted.invalid wrote:

I just bought a new iMac, running 10.3. I was using 9.2 previously. For the twenty years I've owned Macs, I've been shutting them down at night. But I've heard that the Unix system underlying OSX needs to do overnight maintenance and so you need to keep the machine running. Is this true? If so, is there a way to access the maintenance routines and schedule them when you want them to run? Any info about this will be appreciated.

Macaroni, available at the usual download sites. It works well, and is very much worth the small amount of money it costs (US $ 7.99).

David

In article 250320042057515289%mdintenfass@redacted.invalid, Mark Dintenfass mdintenfass@redacted.invalid wrote:

I just bought a new iMac, running 10.3. I was using 9.2 previously. For the twenty years I've owned Macs, I've been shutting them down at night. But I've heard that the Unix system underlying OSX needs to do overnight maintenance and so you need to keep the machine running.

OS X should be allowed to perform periodic maintenance, and the default time for that maintenance is the wee hours of every morning, the wee hours of every Sunday, and the wee hours of the first of each month (depending on what specific tasks we're talking about).

Is this true? If so, is there a way to access the maintenance routines and schedule them when you want them to run? Any info about this will be appreciated.

Someone else mentioned Macaroni. Alternatively, check the man page for the "periodic" command if you're disciplined enough to do it yourself from time to time and can't spare the fee.

Or, I supposed you could use cron to schedule them for some time when the machine is almost guaranteed to be on, dealing with both problems.

G

In article 250320042057515289%mdintenfass@redacted.invalid, Mark Dintenfass mdintenfass@redacted.invalid wrote:

I just bought a new iMac, running 10.3. I was using 9.2 previously. For the twenty years I've owned Macs, I've been shutting them down at night. But I've heard that the Unix system underlying OSX needs to do overnight maintenance and so you need to keep the machine running. Is this true? If so, is there a way to access the maintenance routines and schedule them when you want them to run? Any info about this will be appreciated.

Try the free CronniX application (http://www.koch-schmidt.de/cronnix/). It lets you reschedule any cron chores that would normally run during the overnight hours or add new chores.

Mark Dintenfass mdintenfass@redacted.invalid writes:

I just bought a new iMac, running 10.3. I was using 9.2 previously. For the twenty years I've owned Macs, I've been shutting them down at night. But I've heard that the Unix system underlying OSX needs to do overnight maintenance and so you need to keep the machine running. Is this true? If so, is there a way to access the maintenance routines and schedule them when you want them to run? Any info about this will be appreciated.

The Apple-supplied maintenance scripts are:

    /etc/daily
    /etc/weekly
    /etc/monthly

If you don't want to install anything else, drop to a shell prompt every now and them and run these (using sudo or the root account).

-- David

On Sun, 28 Mar 2004, David C. wrote:

Mark Dintenfass mdintenfass@redacted.invalid writes:

I just bought a new iMac, running 10.3. I was using 9.2 previously. For the twenty years I've owned Macs, I've been shutting them down at night. But I've heard that the Unix system underlying OSX needs to do overnight maintenance and so you need to keep the machine running. Is this true? If so, is there a way to access the maintenance routines and schedule them when you want them to run? Any info about this will be appreciated.

The Apple-supplied maintenance scripts are:

    /etc/daily
    /etc/weekly
    /etc/monthly

If you don't want to install anything else, drop to a shell prompt every now and them and run these (using sudo or the root account).

-- David

You can also edit the times at which these run:

sudo pico /etc/crontab

NM

In article 250320042057515289%mdintenfass@redacted.invalid, Mark Dintenfass mdintenfass@redacted.invalid wrote:

I just bought a new iMac, running 10.3. I was using 9.2 previously. For the twenty years I've owned Macs, I've been shutting them down at night. But I've heard that the Unix system underlying OSX needs to do overnight maintenance and so you need to keep the machine running. Is this true? If so, is there a way to access the maintenance routines and schedule them when you want them to run? Any info about this will be appreciated.

The perceived energy saving from shutting down is minimal.

Let your display sleep, and perhaps your hard drives, but leave the computer up.

For solid state circuits, there are two failure modes... one occurs in the first 5 minutes of operation. Get past that and they will probably outlive you. The other is the heat stress from warming up and cooling down. Leaving the machine on maintains an almost constant operating temperature and insures that your machine will still be functioning when you are ready to move on.

The Unix maintenance routines are mostly cleaning up of temporary and cache files. If you insist on shutting down, there are several shareware or freeware goodies that will run them. On my laptop which does sleep all night, I use ChronAid.

Mark Dintenfass wrote:

I just bought a new iMac, running 10.3. I was using 9.2 previously. For the twenty years I've owned Macs, I've been shutting them down at night. But I've heard that the Unix system underlying OSX needs to do overnight maintenance and so you need to keep the machine running. Is this true? If so, is there a way to access the maintenance routines and schedule them when you want them to run? Any info about this will be appreciated.

My preferred solution is, I think, more in line with the Unix Way.

• Install Fink.
• Install anacron, which is designed for precisely this sort of need.