Automatic reboot for UI-limited machines

Binary package hint: update-manager

Summary:

  At the moment on my Jaunty box I have automatic security updates selected, and mostly that works fine. Sometimes the machine needs to reboot for these updates to be effective. In this case it brings up a dialog informing me that a reboot is required and giving me the option to do so. I would like an option to reboot automatically.

I notice that an option like this is already in the https://wiki.ubuntu.com/auto-update-blueprint , but there are some extra tweaks that would be useful for me.

Details:

  I'm running a mythtv box. This is a home media server that uses the 'lirc' infra-red controller package as its main form of input - I have no keyboard or mouse available for normal use. Auto-update is good, but at the moment when I get the "restart required" dialog I have to go dig out the keyboard or mouse to make the dialog go away.

  There are a couple of potential solutions here:

  - Make the dialog lirc aware, or
  - Make the system reboot automatically, or
  - Make the system reboot automatically, but only when the machine is idle.

The first two would both work, but I think the third is the best option. Detecting 'idle'ness really depends upon what the machine is used for. For me, there are three indicators:

  - The X DPMS system has the display dimmed, and
  - noone is logged in to the samba server on the machine (which happens automatically - the machine is used for Apple Time Machine backups).

The first of those is the most relevant. I don't want the system rebooting while I'm watching a movie, even though the mouse, which is not readily accessible, hasn't moved in weeks. I'd be happy if there was a way to script your own idleness detector, with a simple, sensible, default.

I don't know if this bug belongs in the update-notifier package instead.