Re: What does 'apt' in /etc/cron.daily do?

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

Chris Bannister <cbannister@slingshot.co.nz> writes:

> On Sat, Oct 05, 2013 at 10:39:38AM -0400, Harry Putnam wrote:
>> Logrotation is not happening for some reason, so stumbling around
>
> What is output of:
> apt-cache policy logrotate

,----
| logrotate:
|   Installed: 3.8.6-1
|   Candidate: 3.8.6-1
|   Version table:
|  *** 3.8.6-1 0
|         500 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ jessie/main i386 Packages
|         100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
`----

>> investigating and ran up on /etc/cron.daily/apt
>
> Are we on the same page here? 

Not really sure what you mean there.

I guess it was a little off the wall, just asking what it does with no
explanation of why I wonder, its just that I was trying to figure out
why the cron.daily jobs are not getting run. In particular, my logs
are not getting rotated, yet, I see no difficulties when running
logrotate by hand.

Those things happen from /etc/crontab, and logrotate gets run out of
/etc/cron.daily, along with all the other scripts in there (shown
below)

I'm still homed in on /etc/cron.daily/apt as possible culprit.  Here's
why: The way /etc/crontab executes run-parts,

  test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || 
  ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily )

But anacron just runs the same `run-parts' command when it was missed
at the regular /etc/crontab specified time, so testing

`cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily', like this: (from /)

   time  run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily

  real    25m20.071s
  user    0m5.876s
  sys     0m16.549s

It seems to take an exceptionally long while... and I'm not seeing any
messages from cron about `run-parts'

Once it gets past that nasty apt script... the other scripts finish
quickly.


ls /etc/cron.daily

  0anacron  aptitude      dpkg       man-db   samba
  apache2   bsdmainutils  htdig      mlocate  sendmail
  apt       debsums       logrotate  passwd   spamassassin

They run in alphabetical order so `apt' is the third one to run.

Running that `apt' just by itself takes:

time /etc/cron.daily/apt

  real    25m22.866s
  user    0m0.608s
  sys     0m0.088s

So, its clear the absolute biggest time sink is `apt'.. And like I
said, I had a hard time following the action, trying to read it.

Is 25.5 minutes normal for that script?

And shouldn't I be seeing some kind of report from cron about
`run-parts'?