This is a bit arcane, but it might help someone.

I think Anne was asking recently why some cron jobs were not running 
correctly. This info might shed some light.

The directory /etc/cron.daily contains a list of jobs to be run each day.
The default runtime is 4am so unless you leave the computer on 24/7 they will 
only be run if the anacron RPM is installed to schedule the jobs to run when 
the computer is powered on.

If an email address is given in /etc/crontab you will be alerted to any cron 
job that fails. When a job in the cron.daily list fails execution stops and 
any remaining jobs are not run.

I was getting emails daily informing me that the 'makewhatis' job was failing 
due to certain files not existing. Because of this failure later jobs such as 
'mdkupdate' were not running so my automatic system updates were not working.

Makewhatis is an application to make a database of manual pages. It is not 
particularly important so the job could safely be deleted to allow the other 
jobs to run. However I researched a bit deeper and found that the culprit was 
Postfix.

If Postfix is installed, then cron.daily will fail because makewhatis does not 
like the name of 3 postfix files.
 Rename these files, and it all works OK
/usr/share/man/man5/aliases.postfix.5.bz2   to .../aliases.5.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/mailq.postfix.1.bz2   to .../mailq.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/newaliases.postfix.1.bz2   to .../newaliases.1.bz2

I have checked and 9.1RC1 works OK because symlinks have been put into the 
folders.

derek


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