Aria Bamdad wrote:
Hi,
I have the following crontab file on my SLES10 SP2 systems:
SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/lib/news/bin
MAILTO=root
#
# check scripts in cron.hourly, cron.daily, cron.weekly, and cron.monthly
#
-*/15 * * * * root test -x /usr/lib/cron/run-crons &&
/usr/lib/cron/run-crons >/dev/null 2>&1
59 * * * * root rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.hourly
10 0 * * * root rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.daily
29 4 * * 6 root rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.weekly
44 4 1 * * root rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.monthly
This Sunday, when we move the time back one hour, the scripts in our daily
group ran twice. This is caused by the run-crons script that runs every 15
minutes. In our case, the daily script ran at 12:10AM on 11/1, then again
at 11:10PM on 11/1, and finally at 12:10AM on 11/2.
Searching online, I see various bugs in run-crons causing this type of
behavior on other distributions.
Did anyone else see this behavior over the weekend?
I'm sure they did, it's the obvious behaviour and, without documentation
to the contrary, it's what I would expect.
If you can avoid running cron jobs at the times affected by daylight
savings changeovers, that would help.
Otherwise, crond needs to be taught how to use UTC instead of local time.
On the basis that current behaviour might be depended on by someone
(don't ask me why!), the choice of time might be configurable, and
conceivably, people might want crond to use some time that is neither
local nor UTC, and maybe for individual cron jobs.
This last point applies to me, I want to regularly check a website when
trading is active, and it operates in another time zone. I I could say,
in my crontab, TZ=Australia/Sydney then I could track its trading hours
more easily.
--
Cheers
John
-- spambait
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