[ILUG] [OT] Smart Telecom Broadband offer?

[Niall O Broin]

On 24 Feb 2005, at 16:48, Chris Higgins wrote:

> Obviously you need to run the crontab daily to check to see if it is 
> the start
> of the month and then reboot. Probably a lot more efficient if you ran 
> it
> every 5 minutes though - so you wouldn't miss the start of the month by
> too much.

Using cron you could even run it every minute and be REALLY efficient. 
Or you could of course use cron's facilities to run it just when you 
wanted each month :-)

> I remember being told once that "the unix machines need to be
> rebooted about once a month in order to clean out the memory, and
> that it was a lot more efficient that way".

Gets all the old tired data out of the memory, and replaces it with 
fresh clean data.

> Also - as it's Niall, I think he was taking the mickey suggesting a 
> cron'd reboot.

Well, I was and I wasn't. I run one smoothwall box, and I try to keep 
it as close to stock as possible, for my sake and the sake of anyone 
else maintaining it. Absolutely the EASIEST way of doing the necessary 
on that box WOULD be to reboot it once a month, simply because that's a 
very easy crontab line to write.

The alternative is to dig around the smoothwall scripts and see where 
it updates the dynamic DNS service, and do that via cron on a monthly 
basis. That's going to take more time to figure out, of course, but 
it'd be slightly less naff than the monthly reboot :-)



Niall

P.S. The smoothwall box I run has some issues that cause it to freeze 
now and then, so it rarely even sees a 1 month uptime :-(