Why YDL starts doing stuff at 4 am

If you are new to YDL and have some more or less basic questions.

Why YDL starts doing stuff at 4 am

Postby CronoCloud » 04 Aug 2008, 10:26

If you leave your PS3 on all the time, or if it's running at 4 am you may see the HD light come one and if you look at whats running you see processes running.

Linux machines often do system maintenance at 4 am 0400 hours. It knows to do so because of cron, a daemon that runs all the time and performs jobs at specific times. You can use cron yourself to schedule jobs. (Though I've never done it.) For example, if an open source project released nightly tarballs at say 3 in the morning. Suppose you wanted the newest tarball downloaded, built and installed, every day. You could wait till you wake up and do it manually, or you could use cron to download the tarball, untar it, and compile and install it while you were sleeping so it would be already ready when you wake up. To learn how to do it:

man cron (tells you about the daemon)
man crontab (manual about the program that sets up the crontab file)
man 5 crontab (manual about the crontab file itself.

You may be wondering what happens if your system is not on at 4 am. In that case, a program called anacron will run jobs that were supposed to run but couldn't because your system is off, when it is back on again.

Ron Rogers Jr. (CronoCloud)
CECHE01 PS3 (MGS4 80GB Bundle) without OtherOS and with an upgraded 320GB HD
Running Fedora 23 on a Compaq Presario CQ5320F upgraded with a Phenom X4 and GT640
Vizio E221A1 22" 1080P TV with HDMI, using 1080P over HDMI
PSN ID: CronoCloudAuron
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Re: Why YDL starts doing stuff at 4 am

Postby Harman » 02 Feb 2009, 07:12

Could you set this up to check for and install updates on ALL programs?
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Re: Why YDL starts doing stuff at 4 am

Postby aguilarojo » 26 May 2009, 19:00

Harman wrote:Could you set this up to check for and install updates on ALL programs?


There are books on Linux System Administration which discuss writing cron job scripts. However before you go in that direction it is best to be clear that cron jobs are normally relegated to traditional system administration duties which include minutiae such as shutting down printing jobs when no printer can be found or holding them; sending or controlling what messages are sent to root and when, as well as a myriad of other details. For quick explanation you can refer to Wikipedia here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron

The tool which would work best regarding checking and updating all programs as you originally queried is called yum. There are other resources known within YDL as the Package Manager (or pirut) for which root or system administration access is necessary which are more in line with what you wish to do. Information regarding the Package Manager can be acquired here:

http://us.fixstars.com/resources/

The Package Manager utilizes yum primarily; using yum directly however, if one is very familiar with it's options which can be learned by:

$man yum

or

#man yum

or accessing other details regarding yum usage within the Fixstar's webpages - could be a more speedy approach depending upon what one intends to do. However whether one uses yum directly or the Package Manager, yum's task (even when invoked by the Package Manager) is to acquire, sort and determine the dependencies, updates of programs which are installed versus what is available (not installed) depending upon what commands/instructions you provide to yum when you invoke it.
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Re: Why YDL starts doing stuff at 4 am

Postby CronoCloud » 27 May 2009, 04:57

Harman wrote:Could you set this up to check for and install updates on ALL programs?


Sure, you "could", but there's a yum based daemon that does that, which most people turn off because it's annoying. You shouldn't "need" to update everything, it's usually better just to update only things you actually use on a day to day basis manually. Besides, updates don't happen for YDL applications all that often.

Ron Rogers Jr. (CronoCloud)
CECHE01 PS3 (MGS4 80GB Bundle) without OtherOS and with an upgraded 320GB HD
Running Fedora 23 on a Compaq Presario CQ5320F upgraded with a Phenom X4 and GT640
Vizio E221A1 22" 1080P TV with HDMI, using 1080P over HDMI
PSN ID: CronoCloudAuron
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