August 19, 2014

Why Disabling Screen Blanking Is a Good Idea

Some Linux distributions (for example Debian) in their default configuration blank the screen after a certain time of inactivity. Until recently, I didn’t disable screen blanking on my servers.

But recently one server started freezing once a month or so. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have an IPMI so I have to send a technician over to have a look at it. The problem is: if the screen is blanked you cannot see the messages of the kernel and if the kernel has died, you cannot un-blank the screen.

What I learned from this: Under Debian always remember to set:

BLANK_TIME=0
BLANK_DPMS=off
POWERDOWN_TIME=0

in /etc/kbd/config

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