Re: Creating a randomized cron entry

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

* Stefano Zacchiroli:

> Well, it is random of course. If the distribution is uniform you're
> granted that in the long run it will be run on the average once per day.
> I don't know how stringent were the requirements that the program should
> be run once per day, no more, no less ...

I need this functionality for debsecan:

  <http://www.enyo.de/fw/software/debsecan/>

Specifically, the email-based reporting.  In order to do its work,
debsecan needs to download a small file (less than 100K compressed)
which lists all known vulnerabilities affecting Debian packages.

I'm not sure what users would expect from such a service.  Clearly,
there is already a certain unpredictability because the publishing
pipleine is very long (someone discovers a bug, various things happen,
eventually it is published, picked up by CVE/MITRE and finally by
Debian) and many things can go wrong along the way.  I also intend to
run the script during the early morning hours (local time), so that
you can look at the mail report when you come to work the next day,
which should give some predictability.

I mainly want to avoid a scenario where all clients arrive at 17
minutes past the full hour, and need to be served at the same time.