I have the following question…
My SUSE is 11.0.
In boot.local i’m setting ACPI alarm with /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm
I’ve checked with /proc/driver/rtc that it’s ok.
In cron i have a task that will do some job and then shutdown -h now when executed.
So, for example, i’m setting wake alarm to 5:00 AM tomorrow every time system bots and my task is scheduled to 5:10. So it must boot and execute a task every day at same time.
After configuring described procedure i poweroff with GUI. System successfully boots and executes a task at 5:00 AM but the next day it won’t… It behaves as i need only once…
What’s a problem?
Maybe there are some key differences between halt and shutdown and with shutdown acpid can’t do it’s job to write alarm settings?
I do not think there is much difference between executing the *shutdown *command or shut down via the GUI. But to be sure, why didn’t you test by shutting down also the first time (after confuring) by using the command instead of the GUI?
In fact I am bit uncertain why you use the GUI at all. It seems that you are configuring the system to run something once a day from the batch (cron). For the configuring you do not need the GUI. Why are you using the GUI or running in runlevel 5? This only complicates everything.
Main difference is of course that it first logs out. But the halt command is not very different from the shutdown -h. From the man page:
If halt or reboot is called when the system is not in runlevel 0 or 6, in other words when it’s running normally, shutdown will be invoked instead (with the -h or -r flag). For more info see the shutdown(8) manpage.