[ale] server upgrades

[Jim Kinney]

It's always fun when I have to bring down a server that's under heavy use.
The users complain about how long their jobs need to run (days or weeks!)
and how inconvenient it is to schedule a power down (even when its to add a
10G ethernet card! - Whiners!)

So I think I've found a way to make them a bit happier and thought I'd pass
this along.

hibernate

yeah. That thing used by laptops. pm-hibernate will pause running programs
and dump the RAM to swap space (you MUST have enough swap for this!) and
then power down the system. I do my hardware upgrade and reboot and running
programs come back to life.

NOTE: on a new install I needed to "prime the hibernate pump" by first
running

pm-is-supported --hibernate

to get the system to do a full HAL check and write some config data needed
to hibernate successfully.

Look for the pm-utils package on RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian and
probably al others as well.

-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
*
*Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain
at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail.
It won't fatten the dog.
- Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain
*
http://electjimkinney.org
http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
*
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