Linux has many great tools built in that help maintain the system without user intervention. One such tool is Cron.
On my Ubuntu 8.10 system, there are many things that are set to run each day: locate database updates, misc cleanup utilities, automatic package updates, log rotations, etc. All of these are managed by the Cron system.
For a while, I needed to manually run the updatedb command to update the locate database, and I never thought about why. The problem is that my daily, weekly, and monthly Cron jobs never run. The reason for this is that these Cron jobs are scheduled to run very early in the morning, when my system is off. Thus, these job schedules never run.
The solution for this is easy. I simply need to change the times these run at to times when my system is on.