--- /dev/null
+The case of the late night system boots
+#######################################
+
+:date: 2013-08-09
+:tags: hints,ubuntu,hibernation
+:category: hints
+:author: Jude N
+
+A few weeks back, at around 3:00AM I was woken up by the sounds of a computer booting. It turned out to be an old Ubuntu desktop in the study. Since it was storming at the time, I figured it due to a power outage so I shut down the machine and went back to bed.
+
+A couple nights later the same thing happened. This time I made sure the BIOS on the machine was set to `restore the machine to its previous state after an outage`_ instead of turning it on. It turned out it was already set to restore the previous state. Odd, but it was 3:00AM so back to bed I went.
+
+The third time it woke me up was soon during the time `Thinkhost/Dreamhost dropkicked the old site in the gonads`_, and I start freaking out a little - I wasn't
+getting email, my corny vanity site had disappeared and I had a machine turning itself on in the middle of the night. It was coming out of hibernation when it started,
+so when I noticed it, I was already logged into the console and my 3:00AM self didn't notice any weird activity on the machine. I poked around on the BIOS again to make
+sure the `Wake-on-LAN`_ options were not set and powered down the computer. Still, I started pulling Ethernet cables out before going to bed until I had a chance to really figure out
+what was going on.
+
+Then over the weekend I had started the machine up and then started some Laundry [*]_. When I eventually got back to study, the machine it was still one. I'd been gone long enough that it
+should have gone into hibernation by then. I did a 'sudo /usr/sbin/pm-hibernate' manually and it went through its normal hibernate routine, but after it powered down,
+it immediately booted back up again !
+
+Then it all made sense - the machine had been trying to hibernate and rebooting, then waiting some number of minutes with no keyboard activity and repeating the cycle.
+If I was sleeping lightly enough at the time , the beeps during the restart would wake me up, otherwise I was sleeping through all the restarts. Eventually someone in the
+house would notice the machine was on and shut it down gracefully. I have no clue how long hibernate had been failing like this. Weeks at least.
+
+But onto the solution. I didn't find much on the Internet about the problem (hence this post), but the combination of the `basic-pm-debugging.txt`_ and the
+`pm-hibernate man page`_ led me to try adding an '/etc/pm/config.d/hibernate file with the contents::
+
+ HIBERNATE_MODE=shutdown
+
+With that in place, pm-hibernate went back to working like it used to, and I haven't been woken up by late night restarts since.
+
+.. [*] For purposes of this blog, 'Laundry' is any non-computer indoor activity and 'Going for a Walk' is any non-computer outdoor activity.
+.. _restore the machine to its previous state after an outage: http://superuser.com/questions/368891/desktop-bios-after-power-failure-setting-behavior
+.. _Thinkhost/Dreamhost dropkicked the old site in the gonads: https://pwan.org/blog/first-post.html
+.. _Wake-on-LAN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN#Unauthorized_access
+.. _basic-pm-debugging.txt: http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/power/basic-pm-debugging.txt
+.. _pm-hibernate man page: http://linux.die.net/man/8/pm-hibernate
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