On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 6:09 PM, Felix Frank
<[email protected]> wrote:
> I've been looking at the redmine ticket in [1], which basically asks for
> the ability to purge crontab entries from *all* users' crontabs. As is,

[ Please excuse the perhaps grumpy sounding tone. I am mainly
surprised/confounded :-) ]

Why all the bikeshedding on using the crontab facility, when
/etc/cron.d works like a charm?

If puppet is to have a better way to handle cronjobs, the IMHO clearly
sane approach would be files under /etc/cron.d . There puppet can
assume complete control of a given file, control the name of the file,
etc.

Two easy approaches are evident: install one file per cronjob defined,
or manage one big file that piles up all the puppet-controlled
cronjobs for that host. I am sure those options can be expanded and
refined to handle pretty much any situation we throw at it.

Having built systems over many years -- I cannot imagine a way of
handling cronjobs through the "crontab" facility that doesn't end up
being rather brittle eating data occasionally.

I will also note that this is a different case from authorized keys,
and that taking inspiration from the authorized keys handling code
might be a bad idea:

 - authorized_keys isn't giving us a convenient "conf.d" directory structure

 - authorized_keys _can_ hold old/stale/redundant entries sanely, one
rarely prunes it, where old/invalid cronjobs are an immediate source
of trouble

 - authorized keys can hold duplicate entries without breaking, and
duplicate entries are safe to prune. Duplicated cronjobs are both a
valid configuration, and very bad news if not intended.

IOWs, it is an altogether different kind of fish. Maybe model it on
something that has conf.d style support (
https://forge.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs/apache ? )

The infra I manage currently has all its cronjobs handled by puppet as
files under /etc/cron.d. It would naturally be more elegant to be able
to define the cronjob in a .pp file, and have Puppet handle the file
itself.

But messing with crontab... options like "purge" that remove data
blindly ... dragons be there...



m
-- 
 [email protected]
 -  ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
 ~ http://docs.moodle.org/en/User:Martin_Langhoff

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