How to run script (sleep360) without delaying bootup

[Nigel Henry]

On Monday 23 April 2007 03:59, Tim wrote:
> On Sun, 2007-04-22 at 20:58 +0200, Nigel Henry wrote:
> > This is my setup. I have 2 machines on a LAN. These access the Internet
> > through a Smoothwall firewall, which is installed on an old machine. The
> > Smoothwall accesses the Internet through a serial modem. To connect to
> > Internet I have to have one of the machines on the LAN booted up, so as
> > access the web interface to the Smoothwall.
> >
> > So this is the way it goes. The Smoothwall is left running continually,
> > but I shut down the dialup connection, and the 2 machines on the LAN last
> > thing at night, unless I'm doing updates.
> >
> > Next day. Smoothwall is still running, but no connection to the Internet.
> > Next I boot the machine on the LAN that has the Internet timeservers
> > listed in /etc/ntp.conf. The machine boots up (this is FC2) , but because
> > no Internet connection is available the ntpd times out, goes out to
> > lunch, gives up trying to contact the timeservers, whatever. Post boot
> > up, and running ntpq> pe, sometimes there is 1 of the 6 timeservers
> > showing, and sometimes 4 of the 6.
>
> I would run a NTP server on the smoothwall machine, and rig a way for it
> to restart itself after the connection is up again, automatically.  One
> method might be to use a script to go back-online, and that same script
> issue a restart to the NTP server.

Smoothwall Express2 doesn't have an ntp server available to green (LAN). 
Express3 which is still in Alpha does, but I don't particularly want to run 
an Alpha version, although it has moved on a bit from grizzly to koala. 
Express2, I believe, is using ntpdate to update it's clock, and you can set 
that to run at various intervals.
>
> Then, I would point all the LAN PCs to use that smoothwall machine as
> their NTP server.  That keeps all your LAN in step with each other, only
> one machine hassles external NTP servers (good etiquette), and no
> internal LAN PC has a slow bootup.

No etiquette problems, as only one of my 2 machines on the LAN gets it's time 
from the Internet. The other  machine gets it's time from that machine, and 
the Smoothwall, only polls an Internet timeserver at 12 hour intervals.
>

Nigel.