Reliability v. Fire Risk (original v9n21)

[Bob Sutterfield]

In article <5078 at brazos.Rice.edu> pm at cs.city.ac.uk (Pete Mellor) writes:
| My understanding has always been that SUNs are designed to be
| permanently powered on.

Power cycling at night is something perhaps appropriate to a personal
computer class machine, like a Mac or something running MS-DOS.  Though
workstations are getting to be the same physical size, the general design
and philosophy in UNIX comes down from timesharing systems.  Thus we see
the tremendous overhead in shutting down and starting up a modern UNIX
system - trace through /etc/rc* someday.  A Sun running UNIX is still a
timesharing system at heart, even though it is primarily dedicated to a
single user's needs.  The hardware seems to reflect this software
philosophy, and is happy powered up for months at a time.

On the other hand, the local Sun field service guy told me last fall that
"the latest word from the factory says that monitors should be switched
off when not used, even overnight" to save the phosphors.  This, he said,
was regardless of whether a screen-saver was in use.  I still wonder about
that, and we still leave our monitors (with the rest of the systems) on
all the time.  I'm still wondering whether we'll ever see a more
authoritative pronouncement from "the factory" on that one...