OSX sleep issues / basic maintenance (clarification question)

Hi,

(Sorry to ask this sort of basic clarification Q., but I couldn't find this in the Search area...):

I'm working for an indie guy with a G5 running on OS 10.3.9, and an external RAID chaining off I think a 500 gig external. (All LaCie - yes, I've heard abotu LaCie, but...) my Q is: The Mac nor the externals should never be in sleep mode, right? Also, I was going to set them to restart once a day (early morning), and stay on all weekend (for the background OSX repair stuff) ... right?

Just checking. He'd had some drive problems sometime before I got here, he thought had to do with sleep as well, but he hadn't heard about leaving the Mac on over the weekends for the OSX self-repair.

Thanks.

> The Mac nor the externals should never be in sleep mode, right?

Nope, never.

> Also, I was going to set them to restart once a day (early morning), and stay on all weekend
> (for the background OSX repair stuff) ... right?

Not the drives. The computer you can leave on. Personally, I also shut off the computer, and manually perform the nightly log maintenance. I wouldn't call it a "self-repair".


www.derekmok.com

i'm with Derek.

Switch off at night, power up in the morning,
run the maintenance apps as a routine (weekly to fortnightly works for me)

my last job had 6 systems hooked up to an XSan,
if the machines were left on al night, some complained of weird behaviour.
i didnt experience it myself,
but it was easier to just shut them all down at night.


nick

Sorry, I'm new to the Mac, what maintenance applications?

Wheeeee ... its a doozy of a topic.

Personally, I'm in the never sleep, never off camp, its always worked for me.

Ultimately your decision depends to a very great extent on your particular circumstances and needs ... when you have 30+ seats to deal with and no admin tools, then shutting them all down at night and firing them all back up in the morning can be a real pain in the proverbial. Also, if you have people transfering media to and from the machines after hours, it can really suck when someone has shut down the one you needed to access.

Cheers
Andy

The periodic maintenance one is called, oddly enough, "periodic."

If you don't want to leave your machines running all night (we don't), then it's good to do this about once a week or so. More often doesn't hurt.

Open a Terminal window from Applications, Utilities, Terminal.

Type:

sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

..and press the Enter or Return key. It will ask you for your password because this is an administrator level task. If this job gets over in a few seconds, that's too soon. You need to run the tools one at a time:

sudo periodic daily [return]

...and wait for each one to finish.

The weekly one will take forever. That's normal.

That's the only thing that happens overnight. We do have people in the office who intentionally leave their machines running all the time so they never do these tasks. These tasks will not complete if the machine is sleeping!

The only other heavy Systems tasks we do is to start each machine on the Tiger (or Panther) install CD and run Repair Disk and Repair Permissions from the Disk Utility group. You can do this from the machine internal tools, but you get a much better job running them from the install CD.

The last thing you can do for continued good health is to **never** fill up a hard drive. The rule on a video system is no drive, whether it's part of the show or not is over 90% full. This will let Tiger (or Panther) shuffle, manage, and keep house and hopefully not need any further work than that.

You are doing backups of all the valuable work in case of failure, right?

Koz

"Sorry, I'm new to the Mac, what maintenance applications?"

my apologies... i thought they'd been mentioned.

what we're talking about is routine maintenance that the computer runs on itself.
i always explain it to people as "Little Elves" who come out at night and tidy things up for you.
there are certain things they do on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
if the computer is turned off at night the Elves cant come out

there are a few apps that will summon the Elves for you whenever you want.
the simplest one is Mac Janitor
[personalpages.tds.net]

others that do the same thing, and more are Onyx, and i think Cocktail.

my routine is to run Mac Janitor,
then use Disk Utility to repair Permissions.
i think Mac Janitor does repair permissions, but sometimes it's god to run that twice, and i like to see it happening, or rather see the results.
plus these processes don't hurt anything by having them run more than needed.


cheers,
nick

<<<my routine is to run Mac Janitor, >>>

So there you have the one click, Fuzzy-Warm, Mac version, and the more complicated Heavy UNIX command line version. Unless someone contradicts me, they both do the same thing.

MacJanitor has other talents. I believe it has backup tools. That *is* painful on the command line. You need extra Vodka for that.

Koz

I use Mac Janitor on my powerbook that does get shut down all though I haven't shut it down in a while as I am folding@home on it. Folding@Home is a distributed computing project -- people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to our goals. My G5 stays on all the time and I have no need to run Mac Janitor. I don't believe that repairing permissions has any value in Tiger or maybe even Panther it's a roll over from earlier versions of Mac OS X.

------------------------
Dean

"When I see you floating down the gutter I'll give you a bottle of wine."
Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica.

I understand repairing permissions to still be necessary in Tiger. As it was explained to me by a unix dude, any non-Apple software that needs to change permissions on files during installation may not set them back correctly. So repairing permissions should still be done after you've installed any 3rd part apps. Supposedly Apple apps don't have this problem but I still repair after every install.

I know running "fsck" in single user mode was something you needed to do to fix systems up to Jaguar (10.2x) but apparently it runs during every start up now and running it yourself has no effect.

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!