Re: System Slows Down

[Nathan E Norman <nnorman@incanus.net>]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2003 at 10:32:53AM -0500, ronin2@bellatlantic.net wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Mar 2003 01:41:09 -0800
> Paul Johnson <baloo@ursine.dyndns.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Mar 28, 2003 at 11:44:38AM +0200, Barak Korren wrote:
> > > 2. The right way to configure crontab it to use the contab (1)
> > > command.
> > 
> > This is only the case when you want to update a user's crontab.  The
> > version of cron distributed with Debian automagically detects when
> > /etc/crontab has been updated.  The crontab itself can't be edited
> > with crontab(1) AFAIK.
> 
> I think you're both partly right here. The system crontab can't be
> edited with the crontab command. It looks like The Debian Way to do 
> cron is to add scripts to /etc/cron.daily or /etc/cron.weekly or
> /etc/cron.monthly depending on how often you want the jobs to run.

"The Debian Way" as far as packages are concerned.  The administrator
can do anything she pleases.  It's far safer for automated scripts to
create/remove files (in /etc/cron.{d,daily,weekly,monthly} in this case)
rather than add or delete lines from a file (/etc/crontab).
 
> It also looks like postgres doesn't want to play that way; it has a
> piece of crontab under /etc/cron.d.

*sigh*

man cron(8):

 DEBIAN SPECIFIC
       cron treats the files in /etc/cron.d as extensions to  the
       /etc/crontab  file (they follow the special format of that
       file, i.e. they include the user field). The intended pur­
       pose  of  this  feature  is to allow packages that require
       finer   control   of    their    scheduling    than    the
       /etc/cron.{daily,weekly,monthly}  directories allow to add
       a crontab file to /etc/cron.d. Such files should be  named
       after  the  package that supplies them. Files must conform
       to the same naming convention  as  used  by  run-parts(8):
       they must consist solely of upper- and lower-case letters,
       digits, underscores, and hyphens. Like  /etc/crontab,  the
       files  in  the  /etc/cron.d  directory  are  monitored for
       changes.

-- 
Nathan Norman - Incanus Networking mailto:nnorman@incanus.net
  For the next hour, WE will control all that you see and hear.