Re: apt-get dist-upgrade and cron

[amacater@galactic.demon.co.uk (Andrew M.A. Cater)]

On Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 09:31:26AM -0400, Arthur H. Johnson II wrote:
> ... <stuff snipped> 
> I would NEVER do a dist-upgrade by itself.  Use this instead:
<snip> 
> If your run a dist-upgrade automatically, you might wake up to a broken
> system ;)
> 
I know :) Lots of other people posted this as well :)

The poster originally wanted to know how to use cron as root - that's 
what my email addresses. For a one off, that's fine. For individual
users with one or two entries, that's also fine. 

BUT unrestricted use of crontabs is, potentially, a security hole - 
bastille offers a rule to lock down crontab, for example - and, for 
long-lasting or general configurations it may be worth editing the 
system-wide crontab in /etc

NOTE crontab -e also uses the default editor for editing a crontab - in
some cases, this may be vi - it's always worth learning just enough
vi to feel confident to do this sort of editing IMHO. Ditto with vipw
for editing password files.

HTH in a more general sense,

Andy