Help With SCO scheduling syntax

[Netopia]

Hello Everyone,

I'm going to appologize right from the beginning for not reading the manual on this one. I've got an old SCO Server (5.04) that I need to write exactly ONE scheduled job (cron?) for. I just need the machine to reboot every day at about 6 am.

If no one here can help me, I understand... but for the sake of efficiency I thought I'd ask since this isn't a machine (or OS) that I plan on ever doing a whole lot with.

Thanks for any help/consideration.... I appreciate it.

Joe

 

[YNos]

why do you ned to reboot it? ......could you get away w/ restarting services?

 

[Nothinman]

Yea really, there's almost never a reason to schedule a reboot like that.

 

[Netopia]

This is a box for some proprietary software. Something has gone funky with inet.d and after a few days of running the system claims to be out of memory. A reboot solves it all, restarting inet.d doesn't seem to. In a couple of weeks we'll have an upgrade on a fresh hard drive to 5.05 but in the mean time I'd like to reboot proactively rather than waiting for the error and then having to go around and get 30 or 40 people to log out of the server so that I can cleanly reboot it.

Joe

 

[Nothinman]

become root 'su -'
check the path and syntax to the shutdown command. 'which shutdown' 'man shutdown'
type 'crontab -e' That should startup vi on the current crontab for root
move down to the end of the last line, you may have to use i,j,k,l instead of the arrow keys depending on the version of vi
hit 'a' at the end of that line to start appending
hit enter to begin a new line
enter this: '0 6 * * * /sbin/shutdown -r now'

That should do it, although I don't know anything about SCO so I don't know if it's version of cron or shutdown is different in anyway.

 

[Netopia]

Thanks Nothinman, I appreciate the help. I'm going to telnet into the box now and take a look at the man pages as you suggest.

I'll let you know (could be a couple of days) how things go.

Thanks again,

Joe

 

[Netopia]

Nothinman,

This might seem anal, but you put in ticks, do I have to escape the line or was that just so that I could see the beginning and end of the command?

Joe

 

[Nothinman]

The ticks are just for decoration.

 

[Netopia]

Thanks.

Joe