Shuriken
Shuriken is an XML-based tool for Linux system administrators to set up spans of time when the system should be up. Using the RTC daily alarm (requires BIOS, hardware, Linux support), the system will automatically power on (if it is off) for these intervals. The man pages provide all the documentation for the tools provided.
Releases: Shuriken v1.7 Released
Last Modified: 2003-11-15T22:57Z
I must say, the number of releases of Shuriken that fix tiny bugs make quite an argument for adding some unit tests to Shuriken's code. Fortunately, I think this release fixes the last bug... at least I hope it does.
On the plus side, this bug (that breaks essentially all the programs) was not a regression. I was accidentally trying to delete a block of memory that wasn't mine to delete. For some reason, older versions of the GNU C Library seemed to just ignore this problem. But when I upgraded my Debian packages, I started getting this error (which would break mustbeup(8)).
Anyway, the bug is fixed and the programs work fine once again. This should be the last release... no, really. I mean it this time.
Releases: Shuriken v1.6 Released
Last Modified: 2003-10-27T05:59Z
Somebody, kill me now before I make another insanely stupid mistake on a Shuriken release. Somehow, while making changes for the last release, v1.5, to fix a small bug in mustbeup(8), I managed to completely break the program in the process. Since I only did a quick test to see if the new version worked as expected (and it did), I decided to release.
Now, a few days later, coincidentally after the daylight savings change where I live, I noticed mustbeup(8) stopped working. I assumed the failure was due to the daylight savings change, but it was actually because I completely messed up the code for mustbeup(8) in v1.5. Anyway, it's fixed now and I've released v1.6. Hopefully this will actually be the last release of Shuriken...
Releases: Shuriken v1.5 Released
Last Modified: 2003-10-23T04:57Z
Well, it happened again—I released a version of Shuriken after fixing some bugs that appeared to work flawlessly and a few days later, I discovered it had at least one small, but non-trivial bug. Since Shuriken is not due for any significant feature changes, I figured I should release a new version with the fix, cross my fingers, and hope that this will be the last necessary bug fix release for Shuriken.
This version fixes a small bug in mustbeup(8) that cause it to return true if no time spans are defined in the uptab(5) file. I thought I had fixed this bug with the last release, but I guess I should have done a little more testing, because the bug is present in v1.4. Oh well, at least it's fixed now =)
Releases: Shuriken v1.4 Released
Last Modified: 2003-10-07T00:59Z
Over the course of the last couple months where I've been using Shuriken, I occasionally ran into a problem with my system not booting up when it was supposed to. I assumed this was simply a problem with my initscripts (by that I mean the halt script). However, upon glancing at uptabrtc(8)'s output one day, I found that it had actually calculated my system's UTC offset correctly.
It turns out that when the current RTC date and the actual UTC date were different, the UTC offset would be determined incorrectly by ignoring the days in between the two. This is, of course, fixed in v1.4. Since this is a rather serious problem (the severity being proportional to your RTC's UTC offset =), all users are encouraged to upgrade.
v1.4 also fixes a small bug where the RTC alarm would not be set if no time spans were defined in the uptab(5) file. This would result in the system being online when not necessary (defeating the purpose of Shuriken in some cases). v1.4 also adds a compile-time setting for debugging options on the tools, although only one debugging option has been implemented on uptabrtc(8), --current-time.