im a bit of a linux n00b is the below normal?

Came home today to find my linux box on and i know no one turned it on in my house so i checked the syslog and it turned on today at exactly 12:00:15 and says sanitize start sanitize end

does anyone know what this means?

i have no reason to think my box is compromised as i have found no other suspicious files/logs.

I'm running slackware 12, does anyone know where or what i should check?

any help much appreciated.

Never heard that one before. I must say, it sounds spooky. I would not sleep on the same room as that computer though . Anyway, seriously now, could it maybe be that you had your computer in sleep mode? How did you turn it off? Which command? Did it completely power off?

I never tried Slackware 12, but if my memory does not fail me, back in the 9.1 days of Slackware, Slackware did not power-off the computers completely without loading the apm module:

modprobe apm

And in Lilo, you had to append a line too, something like this:

# Start LILO global section
restricted
append="hdd=ide-scsi apm=power-off"

Good luck!

Linux has the ability to put your computer in a power saving or sleep mode. Some people use this feature on laptops to save battery life when somebody walks away from the computer without powering it down. So it is possible that your computer could have been in hibernate mode instead of being powered down.

What would cause it to turn on at 12:00:15? Usually the power saving feature is configured to power back up when you use the mouse or keyboard. Or it can come back up when a cron job starts. Or even conceivably your cat walked across the keyboard.

You can check if you have power saving enabled with this command:

xset -q

See:

man xset

------------------------------
Steve Stites

Could there have been a power outage ? Some PC's have a setting in the BIOS that can be configured to make the machine automatically boot when the power is restored after a power outage.

modeprobe apm gave me
FATAL: Module apm not found
xset -q gave me
xset: unable to open display

when i shutdown the computer i just typed
halt

The power was turned off in my house today and then back on. Maybe farslayer is right?

Should be easy enough to verify..

You could reboot and check the BIOS settings, look for something like the following.
Last state of course would depend on the state of the system when it lost power..


Shutdown, unplug the PC from the outlet... count to 30.. plug the PC in and see if it boots.

Should be able to verify with either one of those checks.

I had something similar when my power management was set incorrectly. The box was off, not in low power state, minutes later it went on. Keep in mind your pc is always plugged in the power strip. Unless you unplug it manually from the power source. It retains the most basic instructions in the bios. Linux can just hibernate your box under that situation and awake.



2. Since it always is plugged in like another user said. If your house lost power short duration of time. The always present resident part of the pc woke it up.