Autopoweroff: User Guide

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. This software 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. See Autopoweroff configurator.

The SourceForge page for this project can be found here.

Autopoweroff will work on most distributions. However, for some distribution you might have to manually move files to the right place to get it working and write your own init script so that Autopoweroff would start at booting. If you install Autopoweroff from the tarball, this is more likely.

Fully supported distributions include: Ubuntu, Fedora/Red Hat and openSuSE/SLED/SLES. It should also work with Debian and Mandrake. Download the .rpm or .deb package and everything will be installed and enabled automatically. This include setting up Autopoweroff to start at the next computer boot. And if you decide to remove Autopoweroff, everything gets removed.

With a package, you will only have to run the GUI configuration tool or edit /etc/autopoweroff.conf to your particular needs. Autopoweroff will be eventually submitted to Ubuntu's and Fedora's repositories, making it even easier to install it.

HELP WANTED

If you are running a distribution that is not yet supported by Autopoweroff, write to me. I will ask you some questions about your distribution and probably be able to add support for it.

The latest version of Autopoweroff can be downloaded from SourceForge.

RELEASE CANDIDAT VERSION AVAILABLE.

Version 2.9.1 is a release candidate version (3.0.0 will be the stable release). I need people to test it. Unknown bugs might cause your system to shutdown even if someone is making use of it. However, 2.9.1 appears stable and I suggest people to try it out.

Please provide feedback by writing to me at hans@deragon.biz If enough people report to me that this version is stable, I will release it as such.

The Autopoweroff GUI configuration tool is pretty easy.

In the first panel named Status & Commands, the user can enable or disable Autopoweroff and poweroff or reboot the computer.

Status & commands

In the second panel named Status & Commands, the user can configure the different parameters of Autopoweroff. See Autopoweroff configuration file for a description of the different parameters.

Configuration

The /etc/autopoweroff.conf (or ${prefix}/etc/autopoweroff.conf, for those who installed from the tarball) configuration file is well documented and easy to understand. Following is an example:

# Autopoweroff Test version configuration file.

# WARNING:  If you decide to edit this file, edit only the values of the
#           parameters.  If you add comments, they will be lost at the
#           next software upgrade or when the GUI configurator is being
#           used to update the file.  Only values persists.


# StartHour and EndHour parameters (expressed in hours):
#
#   Following is the time range where the computer should not shutdown
#   even if all conditions are met.  In this example where StartHour=5
#   and EndHour=22, the computer will not shut down between 05:00 and
#   22:00, local time.

[NO_SHUTDOWN_TIME_RANGE]
StartHour=5
EndHour=22


# StartupDelay parameter (expressed in minutes):
#
#   When the computer is booting up, if all the conditions are met and
#   the computer is in the shutdown time range, as soon as Autopoweroff
#   is started, the computer will shutdown.  Thus, the user will never
#   have the chance to boot into the computer.  This is where the
#   "delay" parameter comes in.  If "delay" is set to 15 for example,
#   Autopoweroff will not poweroff the computer even if all the
#   conditions are met, for a period of 15 minutes after the computer
#   has booted.  This allows the user to login and change Autopoweroff's
#   configuration.
#
#
# IdleTime parameter (expressed in minutes):
#
#   Like a screensaver, Autopoweroff detects keyboard and mouse
#   activity, and if there is any activity on the server, it would not
#   be powered off regardless if all the other conditions are met.  If
#   set to 0, user activity on the server will be ignored.
#  
#   PS/2 keyboards and PS/2 and serial mices are supported.  AT keyboards
#   will probably work too (if you can confirm this, please write to me).
#   Unfortunatly, USB keyboards and mices are not supported yet 
#   (I do not know how to detect activity on USB devices).

[TIMEOUTS]
StartupDelay=0
IdleTime=10


# Hosts parameter (list of hostnames or IPs, separated by commas):
#
#   Here you list the list of hosts your machine is dependant, i.e. this
#   computer should not shutdown if any of the hosts declared here is
#   still up (responding to ping).

[DEPENDANTS]
Hosts=mafalda, 192.168.0.5

It is possible to setup the BIOS so that the computer will boot itself every day. Each BIOS is different, but they are pretty much similar. Following are the instructions on how to setup an Award BIOS.

On the main page, select the menu POWER, then the POWER UP CONTROL item. Once the new screen shows up, move the cursor to the Automatic Power Up line and select Everyday. On the following line, set the time at which the computer should start everyday. Save the settings and voilà.

To install the .deb package, simply run:

sudo dpkg -i autopoweroff*.deb

To install the .rpm package, simply run:

rpm -Uhv autopoweroff*.rpm

For the tarball, extract it and run configure followed by make install.

tar xvzf autopoweroff.tar.gz cd autopoweroff configure --prefix="<path to the installation directory>" make install

You will need to setup the init script properly. Two versions exists.

To uninstall the .deb package, simply run:

sudo dpkg -r autopoweroff

To uninstall the .rpm package, simply run:

rpm -e autopoweroff

If you installed from the tarball, run

autopoweroff_uninstall

Do not be alarmed by glade warning message showing up when you are running the autopoweroff command (the GUI configurator). These warning appears because you are running a different version of Gnome than the one upon which Autopoweroff was built. Probably you are running an older version, thus some new properties that were introduced are not supported on your older system. For instance, On a Fedora Core 4 system, you will get the following errors:

(autopoweroff:5954): libglade-WARNING **: unknown property `urgency_hint' for class `GtkDialog'

(autopoweroff:5954): libglade-WARNING **: unknown property `wrap_license' for class `GtkAboutDialog'

This is nothing to be concerned about.

Autopoweroff might be of interest to developers because of the following reasons:

This project is a very nice example on how to write a Python daemon that probes input devices, make use of threads
It is also a very good example about packaging for .deb and .rpm based distributions, and universal tarball. It makes heavy use of autoconf and automake.
Finally, be this project a lesson; if you distribute your software with a tarball, provide an easy solution to de-install it. Either provide a script like Autopoweroff is doing, or provide a "make uninstall" target.

The following are features to be added in future releases.

Detect activity from a remote login, either it be console or an X session. Currently, if someone is working remotly on the computer, this will go undetected and Autopoweroff will proceed with the shutdown if all other conditions are met.
Internationalization (i18n). Autopoweroff is currently available only in English.
New GUI that follows more closely the Gnome recommendations.
Better documentation, including writing a man page.
Support for a wider range of Linux distributions.

Following feedback received from user Tomas Klema and another anonymous one, multiple small improvements and fixes were introduced in this version of Autopoweroff:

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.

Like a screensaver, Autopoweroff now detects idle time on the server by scanning for keyboard and mouse activity. Currently, PS/2 keyboards and PS/2 & serial mices are supported (USB devices are unfortunatly not detected yet).
Added automatic configuration file upgrade. If you upgrade Autopoweroff and autopoweroff.conf configuration file format has changed, it will automatically be upgraded to the new format while preserving the previous configuration.
If Autopoweroff, upon startup, discovers that another instance of itself is already running, instead of quiting it kills the old instance and continues.
Replaced calls to "reboot" and "poweroff" with their corresponding "shutdown" command. Some user wrote to me asking where reboot and poweroff could be obtained, so I assume that they are not always available.

Author:	Hans Deragon
Email:	hans@deragon.biz
Website:	www.deragon.biz