Re: Best practices for cron jobs?
On Wed, Jun 13, 2007 at 08:46:42PM +0200, sean finney wrote:
On Wednesday 13 June 2007 06:28:09 Duncan Findlay wrote:
I imagine it would be relatively simple to have the postinst generate
a random time during the day for a cron script to run, but this
doesn't work with anacron -- many users would never get updates.
how would this break anacron?
If you're not using cron.{daily,weekly,whatever} then if the system is
not running at the time the job is due to go off it will not be run by
anacron when the system is next started.
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Re: Best practices for cron jobs?
Hi Duncan! You wrote: Adding a sleep $[ $RANDOM % 60 ] is probably not a good idea as it will hold up all the other cronjobs that should be run. What about making sure the spamassassin cron.daily job is the last one to run (by calling it ZZspamassassin or so)? It might even be worth it to put the random wait in its own /etc/cron.daily/ZZ_randomwait, so that other packages could also benefit from the same construction. Regards, Bas. -- +--+ | Bas Zoetekouw | Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, | || The bridall of the earth and skie: | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | The dew shall weep thy fall tonight;| +|For thou must die. | +-+ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Best practices for cron jobs?
On Wed, Jun 13, 2007 at 12:28:09AM -0400, Duncan Findlay wrote: What can I do to satisfy those with and without anacron, and to avoid hammering the sa-update servers at a specific time? Idea: - Generate a random minute number in the postinst - Set up an entry in cron.d that runs every hour at the above specified minute and calls a helper script that checks if the last invocation of sa-update was more than 23 hours ago (using a timestamp file) and if so calls sa-update Gabor -- - MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute Hungarian Academy of Sciences -
Re: Best practices for cron jobs?
On Wednesday 13 June 2007 06:28:09 Duncan Findlay wrote: I imagine it would be relatively simple to have the postinst generate a random time during the day for a cron script to run, but this doesn't work with anacron -- many users would never get updates. how would this break anacron? What can I do to satisfy those with and without anacron, and to avoid hammering the sa-update servers at a specific time? personally, i would do something like this: - generate the crontab with a random hour/minute into a temp file - register the temp file /etc/cron.d/yourpackage via ucf sean signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: Best practices for cron jobs?
* sean finney [Wed, 13 Jun 2007 20:46:42 +0200]: On Wednesday 13 June 2007 06:28:09 Duncan Findlay wrote: I imagine it would be relatively simple to have the postinst generate a random time during the day for a cron script to run, but this doesn't work with anacron -- many users would never get updates. how would this break anacron? Because anacron can't run stuff only present in /etc/cron.d. Cheers, -- Adeodato Simó dato at net.com.org.es Debian Developer adeodato at debian.org As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand. -- Josh Billings -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Best practices for cron jobs?
Duncan Findlay wrote: Adding a sleep $[ $RANDOM % 60 ] is probably not a good idea as it will hold up all the other cronjobs that should be run. How about using a sub shell, so that other cron jobs can continue? ( sleep $[ $RANDOM % 60 ] sa-update ) (or something like this) Cheers Jan-Pascal signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Best practices for cron jobs?
* Duncan Findlay: I imagine it would be relatively simple to have the postinst generate a random time during the day for a cron script to run, but this doesn't work with anacron -- many users would never get updates. debsecan creates a cron entry which is run hourly, at a random minute, and the invoked script simply does nothing unless a day has passed since the last activity. This was the best thing I could come up with. People keep talking about ucf in this context, but I don't see how it contributes to a solution. (Just make sure that the generated cron entry does not contain any configuration data such as command line arguments.) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Best practices for cron jobs?
Duncan == Duncan Findlay [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Duncan What can I do to satisfy those with and without anacron, Duncan and to avoid hammering the sa-update servers at a specific Duncan time? Look at the clamav-freshclam package. I suspect the maintainers have already encountered similar issues to yours. I can't remember the details of how clamav-freshclam works right now though. -- Brian May [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Best practices for cron jobs?
Hi everybody, What is the best practice when it comes to packages that need to access a network resource in a daily cronjob? Specifically I'd like to have a daily cronjob included in the spamassassin package that will run sa-update. I planned to do this by dropping a con job in cron.daily. As was pointed out in bug 428319, this results in many servers hitting the spamassassin update servers at 6:25 am local time (every server in a timezone that does not have anacron installed). Ideally this should be spread out throughout the course of an hour (at least). Adding a sleep $[ $RANDOM % 60 ] is probably not a good idea as it will hold up all the other cronjobs that should be run. I imagine it would be relatively simple to have the postinst generate a random time during the day for a cron script to run, but this doesn't work with anacron -- many users would never get updates. What can I do to satisfy those with and without anacron, and to avoid hammering the sa-update servers at a specific time? Thanks! -- Duncan Findlay pgpqxfJCSucpx.pgp Description: PGP signature
