Re: [gentoo-user] gnome login panel how to disable restart and shutdown buttons
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 1:11 PM, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: Keep in mind that my incremental power costs right now are $0.42/KWH. For monthly costs I use 24*365/12 = 730 hours/month. Wow, it is only $0.07 cents/kWh here (St Louis, Missouri, USA). The electric company wants to raise rates and the general public is violently opposed (as always). But it seems like we have it good! The highest electric bill I've ever had was $89 last summer when we had a stretch of 100+ degree days... it's a real bargain but I still try to do what I can to save power, not only because of money but because it's The Right Thing To Do(tm). Gentoo is surely not the most power-saving distro when you consider the load that compiling generates, but there are some things I just cannot compromise on. :) They can double, triple, quadruple the electric rates and I'd still be happy; when the power goes out during a storm, etc., I find myself bored to death. Give me my electricity and give it to me now, please. :)
Re: [gentoo-user] gnome login panel how to disable restart and shutdown buttons
On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 8:28 AM, Paul Hartman paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 1:11 PM, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: Keep in mind that my incremental power costs right now are $0.42/KWH. For monthly costs I use 24*365/12 = 730 hours/month. Wow, it is only $0.07 cents/kWh here (St Louis, Missouri, USA). The electric company wants to raise rates and the general public is violently opposed (as always). But it seems like we have it good! The highest electric bill I've ever had was $89 last summer when we had a stretch of 100+ degree days... it's a real bargain but I still try to do what I can to save power, not only because of money but because it's The Right Thing To Do(tm). Gentoo is surely not the most power-saving distro when you consider the load that compiling generates, but there are some things I just cannot compromise on. :) They can double, triple, quadruple the electric rates and I'd still be happy; when the power goes out during a storm, etc., I find myself bored to death. Give me my electricity and give it to me now, please. :) Well, power costs more in pretty, clean California, but not that much more. I did say 'incremental' cost but I'm sure it wasn't that clear. We're tiered here with prices in this email rounded to the nearest penny: Up to 201 KWH @ $0.12 = $24.12 Up to 60 KWH @ $0.14 = $8.40 Up to 141 KWH @ $0.28 = $39.48 Up to 300 KWH @ $0.42 = $126 Prices go up pretty fast. We're 10% or more of the nation so there's a big value to reducing our consumption so they raise prices pretty hard. My incremental comment means that other stuff in this house uses the first 302 KWH each month and using or saving power on my office adds or removes cost at $0.42/KWH. This last couple of months I've managed to get down to 75 KWH in tier 4 so my actual costs in that tier were about $31. If I could get to the middle of tier 3 then it would be about a $50/month savings. Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] gnome login panel how to disable restart and shutdown buttons
On 26 Apr 2010, at 14:25, Mark Knecht wrote: ... I have a machine that's a MythTV backend server. It sits quietly in our living room doing it's job, but it only does that roughly 4 hours per day so for 20 hours it wastes electricity. To make more use of the hardware my wife and son use it at times to browse the web. They are used to shutting off other computers and they sometimes make mistakes and shut this machine off so we lose recordings. In the case of your particular Myth box, it might be worth looking at sleep / hibernate / BIOS wake functionality, to save 20 hours' electricity per day. I haven't looked at this in detail, but I think that Myth can write a wake up time to the BIOS, say of 5 minutes before the next scheduled recording. Thus even if you wife does switch the computer off, it will switch itself on again so that you don't miss your show. Stroller.
Re: [gentoo-user] gnome login panel how to disable restart and shutdown buttons
On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 11:08 PM, Stroller strol...@stellar.eclipse.co.uk wrote: On 26 Apr 2010, at 14:25, Mark Knecht wrote: ... I have a machine that's a MythTV backend server. It sits quietly in our living room doing it's job, but it only does that roughly 4 hours per day so for 20 hours it wastes electricity. To make more use of the hardware my wife and son use it at times to browse the web. They are used to shutting off other computers and they sometimes make mistakes and shut this machine off so we lose recordings. In the case of your particular Myth box, it might be worth looking at sleep / hibernate / BIOS wake functionality, to save 20 hours' electricity per day. I haven't looked at this in detail, but I think that Myth can write a wake up time to the BIOS, say of 5 minutes before the next scheduled recording. Thus even if you wife does switch the computer off, it will switch itself on again so that you don't miss your show. Stroller. Yes, power consumption is very much on my mind these days. All the light bulbs have been changed. A new pool pump is saving me about $80-$90/month. I'd like to do a new fridge but that's not for now. Computers are a big portion of the bill around here and learning how to reduce power is high on my priorities for the next few months. I'm not sure how to handle a multi-use box like this. It's an 8-thread i7 processor. I was wondering about powering off certain core when the machine isn't doing much. Does Intel hardware do that? I need to determine how much power is in the processor, the chipset, memory, the disk drives. The machine is 3-drive RAID1 using data center drives. The WD Green drives just didn't work for RAID. I'm sure 3 drives is adding to my power consumption, but maybe they can be spun down more often. Myth recordings are currently stored on an external USB drive, so that's more power. The problem with this machine is that it's a desktop watching recordings during the day and from 7PM to maybe 3AM it's generally busy recording things. However the TV setup in this house is changing. I'm dropping cable and going with satellite. They provide their own DVR so maybe I'll drop Myth for a while if things work out. That would simplify things, assuming their DVR doesn't consume huge amounts of power. Their DVR supports watching on a Windows PC so I can probably us their app in VMWare which I already use for NetFlix. I appreciate the ideas. I'll likely be asking questions in this area over the next few months. Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] gnome login panel how to disable restart and shutdown buttons
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 10:21 AM, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: Computers are a big portion of the bill around here and learning how to reduce power is high on my priorities for the next few months. I'm not sure how to handle a multi-use box like this. It's an 8-thread i7 processor. I was wondering about powering off certain core when the machine isn't doing much. Does Intel hardware do that? I need to determine how much power is in the processor, the chipset, memory, the disk drives. The machine is 3-drive RAID1 using data center drives. The WD Green drives just didn't work for RAID. I'm sure 3 drives is adding to my power consumption, but maybe they can be spun down more often. Myth recordings are currently stored on an external USB drive, so that's more power. Supposedly enabled and idle cores use even less power than disabled cores because of the way the i7 handles C6 state. Intel claims power usage in this state is approximately zero (not even any leakage). Enable C1E and EIST in your BIOS (they are powersaving options), enable CPU frequency scaling in your Kernel and use ondemand governor (As you would on a laptop). Disable unused network interfaces or SATA controllers etc. in BIOS. NVidia cards using the proprietary drivers have powersaving and underclocking options (enable the option Coolbits in your xorg.conf and then use nvidia-settings to see these extra options) I don't know if PSUs consume more power than necessary. For example if you have a 650W power supply but could have gotten by with 380W, could you save energy by using the smaller one? I'm not an electrical engineer. :) My new system has Samsung drives that seem to have a pretty aggressive spindown time (at least compared to my old ones, which never spundown). I was concerned about this in my RAID5 but what I have really learned was how often my disks are idle. The spindown isn't so aggressive that it happens while I'm actively using the system. I am curious if enabling laptop-mode would have any positive effect on a desktop that has these CPU HDD power saving features? Or perhaps disabling swap entirely and putting temp directories in /dev/shm. Basically the same kind of techniques people having been using on laptops for years to reduce disk activity and power consumption. It's an experiment for a rainy day :)
Re: [gentoo-user] gnome login panel how to disable restart and shutdown buttons
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 8:50 AM, Paul Hartman paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 10:21 AM, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: Computers are a big portion of the bill around here and learning how to reduce power is high on my priorities for the next few months. I'm not sure how to handle a multi-use box like this. It's an 8-thread i7 processor. I was wondering about powering off certain core when the machine isn't doing much. Does Intel hardware do that? I need to determine how much power is in the processor, the chipset, memory, the disk drives. The machine is 3-drive RAID1 using data center drives. The WD Green drives just didn't work for RAID. I'm sure 3 drives is adding to my power consumption, but maybe they can be spun down more often. Myth recordings are currently stored on an external USB drive, so that's more power. Supposedly enabled and idle cores use even less power than disabled cores because of the way the i7 handles C6 state. Intel claims power usage in this state is approximately zero (not even any leakage). Enable C1E and EIST in your BIOS (they are powersaving options), enable CPU frequency scaling in your Kernel and use ondemand governor (As you would on a laptop). Disable unused network interfaces or SATA controllers etc. in BIOS. NVidia cards using the proprietary drivers have powersaving and underclocking options (enable the option Coolbits in your xorg.conf and then use nvidia-settings to see these extra options) I don't know if PSUs consume more power than necessary. For example if you have a 650W power supply but could have gotten by with 380W, could you save energy by using the smaller one? I'm not an electrical engineer. :) My new system has Samsung drives that seem to have a pretty aggressive spindown time (at least compared to my old ones, which never spundown). I was concerned about this in my RAID5 but what I have really learned was how often my disks are idle. The spindown isn't so aggressive that it happens while I'm actively using the system. I am curious if enabling laptop-mode would have any positive effect on a desktop that has these CPU HDD power saving features? Or perhaps disabling swap entirely and putting temp directories in /dev/shm. Basically the same kind of techniques people having been using on laptops for years to reduce disk activity and power consumption. It's an experiment for a rainy day :) Really great info and ideas Paul. Thanks. I've been playing a lot with power measurements here in my home office. I've got three machines each with their own UPS, two internet connections, 5 monitors, a couple of switches. It all adds up. It's been interesting to look at where the power goes. Keep in mind that my incremental power costs right now are $0.42/KWH. For monthly costs I use 24*365/12 = 730 hours/month. 1) Everything shut off except the power strip plugged into the wall. 5 Watts. Just this power strip plugged into the wall driving 3 UPS's that are turned off costs me $1.53/month. For a power strip? (It has a green and red light!) 2) With all the computers and monitors turned off but the UPS's powered on I used about 25 Watts, so that's about $7.50/month. 3) At idle the laptop uses 75 Watts with no external monitors, 125 Watts with a 23 external monitor. IF I have it on 16 hours/ day that's about 2KWH per day or 61KWH/month for a $25 bill. 4) My new i5-661 desktop driving two external monitors actually uses the same 125 Watts as the laptop so that's another $25/month. 5) My new number cruncher based on the i7-980x with 12GB DRAM, 5 hard drives and two external monitors is about double that at 260 Watts. Simply for power consumption reasons I cannot afford to run it 16 hours per day, and I don't need it that much anyway, so I only turn it on when I have a few days worth of number crunching to do. It's probably costing me $10-$20/month since it's on less than 20% of the time. All in all it turns out I'm spending close to $75/month ($1K/year) just in my office! Getting power down is important to me! - Mark
[gentoo-user] gnome login panel how to disable restart and shutdown buttons
Using gdm when I am at the login screen there are two buttons -- restart and shutdown and if you push one by accident it does the action without asking for any kind of password or any authentication at all -- how do I fix this, seems like a big security hole to me. Thanks. -- Your life is like a penny. You're going to lose it. The question is: How do you spend it? John Covici cov...@ccs.covici.com
Re: [gentoo-user] gnome login panel how to disable restart and shutdown buttons
On Monday 26 April 2010 10:06:53 cov...@ccs.covici.com wrote: Using gdm when I am at the login screen there are two buttons -- restart and shutdown and if you push one by accident it does the action without asking for any kind of password or any authentication at all -- how do I fix this Use the keyboard instead. You already have your hands on it to type your password, no? seems like a big security hole to me. To me it seems like rational behaviour. You tell it to shut down - it shuts down. Or do you want Gnome to be like Windows and challenge every action you give it? -- Rgds Peter.
Re: [gentoo-user] gnome login panel how to disable restart and shutdown buttons
Peter Humphrey pe...@humphrey.ukfsn.org wrote: On Monday 26 April 2010 10:06:53 cov...@ccs.covici.com wrote: Using gdm when I am at the login screen there are two buttons -- restart and shutdown and if you push one by accident it does the action without asking for any kind of password or any authentication at all -- how do I fix this Use the keyboard instead. You already have your hands on it to type your password, no? seems like a big security hole to me. To me it seems like rational behaviour. You tell it to shut down - it shuts down. Or do you want Gnome to be like Windows and challenge every action you give it? I don't want a non-root user to be able to shut the computer down -- I did it my mistake and its strange to have it there anyway -- least it should do is ask for the root password. -- Your life is like a penny. You're going to lose it. The question is: How do you spend it? John Covici cov...@ccs.covici.com
Re: [gentoo-user] gnome login panel how to disable restart and shutdown buttons
On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 5:28 AM, cov...@ccs.covici.com wrote: Peter Humphrey pe...@humphrey.ukfsn.org wrote: On Monday 26 April 2010 10:06:53 cov...@ccs.covici.com wrote: Using gdm when I am at the login screen there are two buttons -- restart and shutdown and if you push one by accident it does the action without asking for any kind of password or any authentication at all -- how do I fix this Use the keyboard instead. You already have your hands on it to type your password, no? seems like a big security hole to me. To me it seems like rational behaviour. You tell it to shut down - it shuts down. Or do you want Gnome to be like Windows and challenge every action you give it? I don't want a non-root user to be able to shut the computer down -- I did it my mistake and its strange to have it there anyway -- least it should do is ask for the root password. It's a very reasonable request he's making. I have a machine that's a MythTV backend server. It sits quietly in our living room doing it's job, but it only does that roughly 4 hours per day so for 20 hours it wastes electricity. To make more use of the hardware my wife and son use it at times to browse the web. They are used to shutting off other computers and they sometimes make mistakes and shut this machine off so we lose recordings. If the buttons didn't exist then they wouldn't make that mistake. If the buttons required them to type a non-root password used to allow a user to shut the machine down then they'd remember that this machine is different and not make that mistake. I personally think covici's request is very reasonable. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] gnome login panel how to disable restart and shutdown buttons
On Monday 26 April 2010 13:28:50 cov...@ccs.covici.com wrote: I don't want a non-root user to be able to shut the computer down -- I did it my mistake and its strange to have it there anyway -- least it should do is ask for the root password. Ah, I see. Well, that's more-or-less how SuSE used to work; I don't know what it's like nowadays. -- Rgds Peter.
Re: [gentoo-user] gnome login panel how to disable restart and shutdown buttons
On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 05:06:53 -0400 cov...@ccs.covici.com wrote: Using gdm when I am at the login screen there are two buttons -- restart and shutdown and if you push one by accident it does the action without asking for any kind of password or any authentication at all -- how do I fix this, seems like a big security hole to me. Thanks. Build gnome with the policykit flag set. Then you need to give permission to the user to shutdown or restart. I do not know about GDM. Have you looked in gconf-editor for a setting?
Re: [gentoo-user] gnome login panel how to disable restart and shutdown buttons
Jonathan winelauncher.jonat...@googlemail.com wrote: On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 05:06:53 -0400 cov...@ccs.covici.com wrote: Using gdm when I am at the login screen there are two buttons -- restart and shutdown and if you push one by accident it does the action without asking for any kind of password or any authentication at all -- how do I fix this, seems like a big security hole to me. Thanks. Build gnome with the policykit flag set. Then you need to give permission to the user to shutdown or restart. I do not know about GDM. Have you looked in gconf-editor for a setting? I did not look in gconf editor, and gdm at least, is compiled with the policykit use flag, so I am not sure where to go with this. Where would I look in gconf? -- Your life is like a penny. You're going to lose it. The question is: How do you spend it? John Covici cov...@ccs.covici.com
Re: [gentoo-user] gnome login panel how to disable restart and shutdown buttons
On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 21:40:02 +0200, cov...@ccs.covici.com wrote about Re: [gentoo-user] gnome login panel how to disable restart and shutdown buttons: I did not look in gconf editor, and gdm at least, is compiled with the policykit use flag, so I am not sure where to go with this. Where would I look in gconf? Take a look at /usr/share/gdm/defaults.conf. # Specify which actions are displayed in the greeter. Valid values are # HALT, # REBOOT, SUSPEND, and CUSTOM_CMD separated by semicolons. SystemCommandsInMenu=HALT;REBOOT;SUSPEND;CUSTOM_CMD # Specify which actions are supported by QUERY_LOGOUT_ACTION, # SET_LOGOUT_ACTION # and SET_SAFE_LOGOUT_ACTION. Valid values are HALT, # REBOOT, SUSPEND, and # CUSTOM_CMD separated by semicolons. AllowLogoutActions=HALT;REBOOT;SUSPEND;CUSTOM_CMD You wll, of course, need to recycle xdm when you are done. -- Regards, Dave [RLU #314465] == dwn...@ntlworld.com (David W Noon) == signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] gnome login panel how to disable restart and shutdown buttons
David W Noon dwn...@ntlworld.com wrote: On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 21:40:02 +0200, cov...@ccs.covici.com wrote about Re: [gentoo-user] gnome login panel how to disable restart and shutdown buttons: I did not look in gconf editor, and gdm at least, is compiled with the policykit use flag, so I am not sure where to go with this. Where would I look in gconf? Take a look at /usr/share/gdm/defaults.conf. # Specify which actions are displayed in the greeter. Valid values are # HALT, # REBOOT, SUSPEND, and CUSTOM_CMD separated by semicolons. SystemCommandsInMenu=HALT;REBOOT;SUSPEND;CUSTOM_CMD # Specify which actions are supported by QUERY_LOGOUT_ACTION, # SET_LOGOUT_ACTION # and SET_SAFE_LOGOUT_ACTION. Valid values are HALT, # REBOOT, SUSPEND, and # CUSTOM_CMD separated by semicolons. AllowLogoutActions=HALT;REBOOT;SUSPEND;CUSTOM_CMD You wll, of course, need to recycle xdm when you are done. -- Regards, They seem to have abolished the defaults.conf in 2.28.2, however I found a gconf key /apps/gdm/simple-greeter/disable_restart_buttons and if I use gconftool-2 --set /apps/gdm/simple-greeter/disable_restart_buttons true as the gdm user, this fixed the problem.' Thanks to all for your responses. -- Your life is like a penny. You're going to lose it. The question is: How do you spend it? John Covici cov...@ccs.covici.com
