Re: Booting decision based on time?

[Richard Kreuter]

On Fri, Jun 14, 2002 at 11:16:42AM -0700, Titus Winters wrote:
> On (06/14 11:29), Johannes Maslowski wrote:
> > is it possible to make Grub decide automatically to boot a OS based on
> > time? I haven't found anything in the documentation. If not, how
> > difficult would it be to implement?
> > 
> > We are considering to automatically reboot a windows-pool at night and
> > load linux via tftp/nfs, to run some computing jobs.
> > 
> > Any other suggestion I would appreciate as well ;)
>
> Since you are already setting up a tftp server, try the following:
> 
> Automatically (after some timeout) retrieve a menu.lst file from the
> TFTP server.  That file can be setup on a cron-job to change based on the
> time, and thus decide whether or not the machine goes into linux or 
> windows.  Slightly kludgy, but could probably be made to work.

  Where I used to work, we had a lab that needed to do automated disk
re-imaging using tftp, in order to propogate security fixes, etc., to
the stations.  What we ended up doing was having a few menu.lst files
on disk, and rotating them as needed during the boot sequence to cause
the subsequent reboot to do the right thing.  All the relvant systems
could manipulate files on a fat partition, so we put the grub
configurations there.  If windows offers facilities to run jobs on a
scheduler (presumably it does), you could rotate the grub
configurations that way, and rotate them back when booting the
linux-based system.

Richard Kreuter
address@hidden