Turning Off the Computer

[abreauj-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org (John Abreau)]

I often need to look up something on my home desktop while
I'm out of the house, so I generally leave it running all the time.
I access it remotely via an OpenVPN tunnel where the home
machine is the client, so wake-on-lan isn't an option.



On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 8:19 AM, Palit, Nilanjan
<nilanjan.palit-ral2JQCrhuEAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Actually, as a matter of routine, I shut off my (Windows) desktop by hitting the power button to my CPU. The reason is that I have the power button mapped to Hibernate. This eliminates any accidental shutoffs (like the one mentioned). More importantly, given how frequently I use my computer and that I don't want to keep my computer running all the time (saving energy and money), it saves me the hassle of doing ALT-CTRL-DEL. I save that for when I really want to shutdown &/or restart my computer. On my Windows laptop I have the power button mapped to Standby since I use it even more frequently and like a quicker startup time.
>
> -Nilanjan
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: discuss-bounces-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org [mailto:discuss-bounces-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org] On Behalf Of Jarod Wilson
> Sent: Saturday, October 18, 2008 9:32 PM
> To: discuss-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org
> Subject: Re: Turning Off the Computer
>
> On Sat, 2008-10-18 at 21:13 -0400, Bruce Borland wrote:
>> The other night I asked my son to turn off the computer.  He apparently
>> did not want to wait for the computer to shut down normally, so he
>> decided to switch off the power to the machine, stopping it immediately.
>>  I told him that was not good to do, but he asked me why.  I did not
>> have an answer for him.  He did this to our Windows machine, but I
>> understand that it is not good to turn off a Linux machine this way
>> either.  Can someone explain what problems are caused by such an
>> immediate shutdown?  I would like to know, and would like to tell my
>> son, too.  Thanks.
>
> Hard disks are slow, so operating systems tend to cache data into
> volatile system memory, before periodically flushing it out to disk --
> only doing one larger batch write vs. lots of small writes all over the
> place is a performance win. Pulling the machine in mid-flush means the
> on-disk data winds up in an inconsistent state. In some cases, a hard
> drive that looses power while in the middle of writing data can even
> cause physical damage to the disk platters (rare anymore these days
> though). Running services on the machine could be left in a funky state
> too, if they were in the midst of some type of transaction (think
> database apps here). Undoubtedly more examples out there.
>
> Not that it shouldn't be possible to make shutdowns *much* faster for
> desktop systems... I mean, if you've got a desktop not running any
> services, and the user has closed all their docs, syncing in-memory
> buffers out to disk and powering off is really pretty safe...
>
> --jarod
>
>
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-- 
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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