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Have you restarted your computer this week?

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Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#101

Post by genewitch »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #24
ck2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's an interesting thought but would violate physics for lightning to come in through the ground line?

No. This isn't some theoretical Star Trek neutrino emissions scenario. Lightning punches-out wherever it hits, including ground, which is directly connected to neutral.

i think this isn't common knowledge; as it's only tied at one panel, and separate in the other (in the US); so there's two busses in the main breaker panel, one for white and one for green/bare. It's only the utility/ingress panel that has the neutral and ground bonded. It's a fluke of the way we deliver power in the US, split phase, maybe.

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#102

Post by vladvasiliu »

gonzalohm wrote: post #46
kps wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe this is because of how Mac is designed Yes, that they actually got sleep working properly.

What's the point of sleeping your computer? If you are not using it then it's better to just turn it off

It takes ages to cold boot. My desktop is ok-ish, but it doens't matter since I only use it occasionally.

My old HP laptop had a slow-ass BIOS that I was convinced had some kind of bug. I replaced it with a brand spanking new thinkpad 2-3 months ago. Guess what? The freaking BIOS is EVEN SLOWER somehow!

They all wake up instantly from sleep.

I therefore only shut them down when I know they'll be unplugged for a while, because for some reason the HP eats through the battery even when off. If suspended, the battery will be out of juice in like two days. Haven't tried any of this with the Lenovo yet.

Suspend used to work great, but since MS figured they should copy Apple half-assedly, suspend is borken. And I have really no idea what we've gained in exchange.

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#103

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

BoppreH wrote: post #72

This is actually useful for smartphones. Sometimes smartphone malware is capable of infecting a device but not persisting, so reboots clean it back up. At least if you trust the NSA's advice: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21018353/nsa-mobile-d...

The people that I know, in the security field, restart their phones, multiple times per day.

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#104

Post by dminik »

swiftcoder wrote: post #44
dminik wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a large part is also how long it takes to restart a Mac. Every so often a coworker has to restart and I could probably restart my Linux (or even Windows) laptop 3 times before they're back on. Kind of reminds me of how slow Windows computers used to boot back in the Vista and 7 era.

Wat? The apple silicon one on my desk restarts in under 30 seconds. Markedly faster than the Windows PC next to it

I'm glad it works for you, but I have witnessed several coworkers restart their macbooks (some M1, some M2, possibly M3) and I don't think I've ever seen a reboot shorter than about two minutes.

At one instance, I rolled over to a coworker who has just rebooted theirs and had a whole 5+ minute conversation.

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#105

Post by w10-1 »

kylemaxwell wrote: post #19

I remember when Linux users were practically obsessive about uptime and restarting felt like a sign of failure. This was at a time when Windows seemingly needed to restart once or twice a day, at least. These days I like to turn my work Mac off at the end of the week just so I feel a literal sense of closure. It's not really the applications minimizing and running in the background; it's ME.

At Javasoft there were Solaris test machines that had been up for 2+ years, and we had to reboot the windows test machines multiple times a day. It felt really good to leave a large queue of work at the end of the day on the Solaris/Sparc machines, knowing it would be done the next morning.

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#107

Post by dv35z »

I have a cron job which restarts my computer every day (Linux Mint Debian edition). I like waking up to a "fresh" computer, and since I know that it will restart every day - this is a "forcing function" to (1) be diligent about saving things that are important, (2) treating browser tabs, random notes, etc as ephemeral, and bookmarking the important stuff.

I used to work at an office where we pair-programmed with clients all day (Pivotal Labs), and most of our computers had some sort of "automatically restart / restore from a known-good image". I liked this, as it resulted in less cruft over time, and some intentionality about what getting a computer into a productive state means. It also got me thinking of using automatic routines to accomplish goals, and not being so attached to my open tabs, etc. Let it gooo....

To be more specific about this - for those wanting to get into blogging/publishing, this could mean auto-opening the website project folder using VSCodium upon user login, so its ready to go for the morning coffee. More half the time I just close it - but as a "default", it makes it easy for me to do the thing I want to do.

  sudo crontab -e -u root

  #-----------------------------
  # RESTART COMPUTER DAILY
  #-----------------------------
  00 04 * * * /usr/sbin/shutdown -r +5  "Rebooting in 5 minutes. Run 'shutdown -c' to cancel"

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#108

Post by grimjeer »

I reboot one of my machines all the time. It's a Mac Mini running 'Little Snitch', which informs me about all of the network connects my apps make, especially browsers. One cool feature of that program is that one can temporarily grant access to a connection, for instance until the request quits, or one logs out, or one restarts a machine. I'm slowly developing permanent allow / ban lists, but I also use this feature to temporarily utilize some website, aand then reboot to avoid cross-contamination.

The downside is that I often get shunted off into additional authentication workflows, since the prolonged delay caused by my manual approvals triggers some alerts. One of the entertainment ticket buying services is really convinced I'm committing some kind of fraud.

So, in general, I reboot everytime I start using that machine, at least once per day, sometimes more frequently.

Fun fact: in a former life, I worked for a retailer with 1000s of remotely deployed machines and no field-based tech support. One of the OSes we used back in the day had a bug that caused their license authorization service to fail after a certain amount of uptime. We had hundreds of machines that reached that uptime, all on the same day. Suffice it to say, that was not fun.

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#109

Post by joeig »

kylemaxwell wrote: post #19

I remember when Linux users were practically obsessive about uptime and restarting felt like a sign of failure. This was at a time when Windows seemingly needed to restart once or twice a day, at least. These days I like to turn my work Mac off at the end of the week just so I feel a literal sense of closure. It's not really the applications minimizing and running in the background; it's ME.

I remember when I was asked to replace a core router with a more powerful model. The uptime of the Cisco router was ten years - and it was ten years after the datacenter went into service.

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#110

Post by usefulcat »

milesvp wrote: post #77
simmons wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I remember feeling pride in the stability of my systems when I saw a large uptime. I had a server that had 1000 days of uptime, once. Now when I see a large uptime, I'm terrified of what security patches the kernel may be missing!

I still remember the days of servers as pets, rather than cattle, and I was harping about server uptime. A wizened server admin piped in and said he rebooted his servers once a week. Said, if you do it any less frequently, then the odds of catching an error causing change while the person who made said change (possibly himself) is still around and can remember what they did go down precipitously. So, to avoid headach…

So true. We have one older, rather large machine in a data center that's been up for.. (checks uptime): 963 days. It has IPMI but at some point something stopped working and now we have to physically go to the data center to restart it. And since we use it every day we can't really afford to lose access to it.
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