User:Flyser/Low maintenance Gentoo

This article aims to collect instructions to reduce maintenance overhead of gentoo to a minimum.

Use Cron
This is an advice rather than actual instruction and should be a no-brainer, but I want to mention it nonetheless: When you need to execute the same tasks periodicly, use a cron daemon.

Depending on the type of the task and the system, you may choose a traditional cron daemon such as vixie-cron or dcron or you might prefer a cron implementation that tries to be slightly more intelligent such as anacron, which is often a good choice of non-server systems.

Use atd
atd is a daemon, which allows users to schedule commands to run at one specific time.

Install ntpd
The ntp daemon is a convenient way to keep the clock of an unix system in sync. While ntp could also be run manually once in a while, the daemon solution is preferable as it uses the adjtime syscall to avoid large time jumps. Here is how you do it: Note that the system time will not change immediately after starting the daemon. Be patient.