Autopoweroff For Linux

Autopoweroff is daemon that is started at boot time, and which function is to shutdown the computer at a specific time, but only if some conditions are met. It is meant for the Linux operating system.

The computer will shutdown if all the above conditions are met:

� Any hosts that the computer is dependant on is not answering ping anymore. � No keyboard or mouse activity has been detected on the computer for a while. � The user has not disabled Autopoweroff.

One good use of Autopoweroff is for home use, on a firewall/router server. You can setup Autopoweroff to shutdown the server every evening at say, 22:00. However, your server might serve other computers in your home. Autopoweroff will shutdown the server after 22:00 only if no other computer on the network is responding to ping. For example, if at 22:43 you are still working on your thin client in the living room, the server in your baseman will remain up. As soon as you shutdown the workstation, the server will go down.

The server can boot automatically every morning by setting its BIOS properly. Autopoweroff has nothing to do with this process. But with this setting, your home server does not need to run 24/7. The advantages such a setting offers are:

� Increase security. Nobody can hack your server while its shutdown. � Save electricity and curb down heat generation. � Cut down noise. A shutdown server does not produce any noise. � Avoid the hassle of having to shut down and start up the server manually.

A nice GUI is provided to configure Autopoweroff's parameters.

What's New in This Release:

� Moved the icon from "Applications/System Tools" to "System/Administration". � LSB and rc.status based bootstrap scripts now supported in the RPMs. � Now supports officially the three main distributions: Ubuntu, OpenSuSE and Fedora. � `arping` is now also used in addition to `ping` to test if dependant hosts are up. This cascading of tests increase the chances to detect a dependant host if the host make use of a firewall. � If /dev/input/by-path/* are non-existant on a system, /dev/input/* entries are used instead. This will allow Autopoweroff to detect user events on Ubuntu 06.06 for instance. � About dialog would not close properly. This has been fixed. � Some small GUI improvement were introduced. Mainly, some widgets were simply to small for the font size. They were slightly increased. � Files in subversion were moved to trunk/. branches/ and tags/ where created to better manage the software.