/etc/cron.daily/apt hangs [deviated discussion]

[Derek Broughton]

Nils Kassube wrote:

> Daevid Vincent wrote:
>> Switching off/on a desktop is so bad for the hardware. It's better to
>> just leave them on.
> 
> Can you explain what part of the hardware will be damaged from regular
> switching on/off? I'm using computers at home for >20 years and I have
> always switched them off when I'm not at home and during the night. I
> don't think I had any harware fail within the first 5 years of their
> life.

There's no truth to that ridiculous urban myth.  It would probably be true
if one were switching on & off _often_, but most computers will go through
no more than two on-off cycles daily.  It's over a decade since I had a
computer component fail for anything that could likely be powering on/off,
and that was an actual power switch!  These days, the drive is always the
first thing to go.

>> Especially any Unix flavor -- for exactly the
>> reasons we're discussing here. Crontabs need to be run. Having them all
>> "catchup" later (via anacron) is a kludge.

It is not a "kludge" because as somebody else mentioned there are no
guarantees about timing for cron.daily, etc.  (and in fact anacron
_doesn't_ run anything that you have set exact times for -ie, those with
their own crontab entries).  There are very few things on a _personal_
system that need to be run at set times.

> IIRC, this desktop machine I am using right now needs about 70W. If I keep
> it running over night only for a few cron jobs it would cost me an extra
> 40 ?uro per year. Therefore I prefer the anacron kludge.

It would cost me far more than that - 24/7 at 70W is about my entire
generating capacity, since I live off-grid.
-- 
derek