nice Mini-ITX box

An indicator of a lack of aptitude.

Use task scheduler to turn it off a few minutes before the power down cycle. Duh.

No, it won't. Better put an APC UPS which can initiate a proper shutdown using the data link between the PC and the UPS.

"John Larkin" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Why not just recycle power to the modem? Xp doesn't like power failures, disk corruption.

Cheers

Might look at the XP Embedded dev kit. There's an option, cleverly known as the Enhanced Write Filter (EWF)

that can re-direct all disk writes to a RAM disk. This makes the OS environment stateless -- turn it off at any time and it fires up again just like new.

You could protect just the OS partition with EWF and, for example, keep your log files, image captures, etc. on a separate partition that *you* control. When it's reboot time, close all open files on that partition and run sync to flush the disk cache, then pull the plug.

Downside, of course, is needing the XPe kit, plus the pain and agony of getting a working XPe image. Still, that's the problem domain that XPe was designed for.

What kind of 'automation' are you doing there? Doesn't that modem have a reset switch?

A real man would have taken a 9mm Glock and shot it off :-)

Watch that now bare electrolytic. Those things easily break off. Or someone drops that fork behind there ... bzzzzt ... hiss ... crackle ...

That modem design looks like the perfect entry for the hall of blame. Often you can fix those things with a kludge: Find out whether there's a master reset pad in there. Then take an old alarm clock and wire its contact to that. Ok, now you have 1/2h resets every 12h but people should get used to eating their lunches without cyber information overload anyhow :-)

If that ain't so cool you could hang a POR/BOR circuit on there that issues only a brief reset of a second or so every time the alarm clock comes around.

If you have lawn sprinklers at the cabin you could let an unused zone come on for one or more minutes in the dead of night and do the thing, via a 24V power relay.

Probably requires lots of massaging. At Endosonics I had one condition. The software guys were free to decide almost all architectural stuff but it had to be Joerg-proof. Rapid flicking of the power switch, pulling a breaker while booting, kicking it while a DICOM loop was being written, and so on. It was NT back then but they got it done. However, a big chunk of the OS was now custom.

That's why I suggest laptops in situations like this. Much easier. Even if you take one where the battery is almost shot it is usually able to power it for 10-15 minutes. Plenty. Power goes because times kicks off

-> laptop goes to battery. Battery settings are such that it enters hibernate after 5min or less of being on battery -> orderly shutdown ->

voila. Power up would have to be set so that it de-hibernates all the way back into windows and into the applications that were open, meaning no password entry and such.

I would be uncomfortable, but I live in a situation where my wife more often than not just unplugs the XP machine. Special circumstances exist, so I don't argue. Point is that it is still fine despite the abuse. But I still don't like the idea and wouldn't encourage it.

Old DOS systems were simply powered off, by design. (If the lack of thoughtful design can be called design.) No shutdown procedures existed. Seemed to work, though TSR drivers were added later to cache disk writes for a short time. But that could be turned off. So I imagine old Windows systems (based on DOS launch) such as Win 3.1 and 3.2 (yeah, it exists) would probably fare okay, as well. A chkdsk on occasion usually took care of lost clusters.

Do you have to use XP?

Jon

Because the webcam app will stop if the cable modem is down, and it won't recover. That's the story of Windows: if it ain't something, it's something else.

John

No, and I don't have a robot to push it if it did.

The app is remote temperature reading, furnace control, and webcam. Mo doesn't like it cold, so I can turn on the heat before we leave SF and have the place toasty when we get there. It works, usually, but the cable service is a little flakey up here, and tends to hang up the modem and the PC apps. A hard power cycle, from a mechanical timer, seems the best fix.

John

I just ripped out a netbook and replaced it with this box. The netbook has a zillion hours of battery backup, but when the cable modem goes out, the webcam app dies and sometimes the winsock hangs. So I wrote an app to reboot the PC every day at 3AM, so it will recover *if* the cable modem comes back, but *that* locks up about one time out of 30.

Windows is crap!

John

Well, I'm writing the automation apps in PowerBasic, and using a Windows webcam app, things I know how to do.

John

Something ain't right, normally a hanging modem does not cause Windows to become stuck. Out here the DSL link (very occasionally) hangs and the modem needs a reboot. That's the ISP though. In the old days it happened a lot, most likely because they over-sold and then ran out of IP addresses. I never had Windows hang after that.

I used to have a camera on this computer here and it actually did the opposite: If came on after every reboot even though I didn't want it to.

Nah, something must be wrong with your Windows, because I am running XP here and this never happens. You don't run Win7 or Vista, do you? Because that could be a whole 'nother story.

Then my experiences with daily power-off shut downs of XP suggest you will be fine. I don't like the idea, but I also can't argue with years' of real-world experience doing it, routinely. May just be luck, though.

Jon

You missed the point completely. He HAS to interrupt power. So a UPS will not work.

You're an idiot. Power failures are a part of fault tolerance which windows has back... way back. With modern HARD DRIVES, one does not spray stray bits all over the drive if it was writing when the power dropped. All that gets lost is the last write, at the very most.

Where have you been?

I had the same sort of problem last fall, when I was trying to supervise a bunch of parallel simulation runs that went for days. I travel a fair amount these days, and I needed to run the sims for about 2 months to make the customer deadline. I had a run of bad luck with DSL routers--I had two Ciscos that crashed after about an hour, and two or three other brands whose port forwarding was completely broken.

I ran out of runway before a long trip, and had to use a Christmas light timer to turn the router off for 15 minutes every 2 hours. :(

Maddening--I should have just hired somebody to do a turnkey network, but I was still in penny-pinching mode, so of course it cost me far more in the end. I replaced the DSL setup with a business FIOS account, which is much better--the network itself is bulletproof, and the router Verizon supplied is pretty good, but I still have a Buffalo wireless access point that goes funny every couple of days--existing connections slow down, and new ones fail.

NTFS is a journalling file system, so you typically don't wind up with the file system in an inconsistent state on a power failure. Registry stuff is another matter. In Linux, I'd just use a crontab entry to shut down the machine before the timer hit, but that (or the Windows equivalent) still leaves you with a problem: if there's a real power outage, the RTC and the mechanical timer will get out of sync.

How about a little script that checks whether the network connection is up, and a SSR controlled by a parallel port pin (or whatever folks use for that at this point) to reboot the router? You could reboot the machine as well, at your option.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I did not miss the point. An UPS is a simple way to shut down nicely when the power is cut by a timer. I know for sure the software from APC allows to shut the UPS down after the PC has shut down. So when the timer switches on again, everything is started properly.

Joerg's laptop idea is very similar.

Yup. that's the next option if the timer isn't reliable.

Pretty soon the boot closet will be full of electronics, and we'll have to stash the ski boots somewhere else.

John