Harry Putnam wrote: > Further testing... first take anacron out of play as BobP suggests. > I removed the the anacron part of the line in /etc/crontab > original(except dates) : Just for the record I was suggesting: apt-get remove anacron That by itself should be sufficient. And then if you desired to have it back you could: apt-get install anacron And it would all be as it was before. Either way. In or out. > 47 22 * * * root test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || > ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily > > edited: > > 47 22 * * * root cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily Let me comment on the idiom. In Debian we want things to be as automatic as possible. The /etc/crontab file is owned by 'cron'. But it is nice if users can install 'anacron' and have it work without needing to do anything. A long time traditional cron idiom is to test for something and then do something depending upon the test being true or false. Sometimes that is if $HOME is mounted. That way if /home is not mounted such as during some maintenance then cron won't make a lot of noise. test -d $HOME && dosomething Sometimes the test will be as above with anacron. If the anacron program is installed then do nothing because anacron will do it. But if anacron is not installed then do it ourselves. test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily ) As can be seen by this logic it means that no configuration changes are needed if anacron is installed or removed or never installed or re-installed or whatever. It doesn't scale very well because cron needs to know about anacron. But for a single special case like this it works pretty well. And so if anacron is apt-get removed then /usr/sbin/anacron does not exist and run-parts will be run. It isn't necessary to edit the line if the anacron package is removed. > And then adjusted the time to be able to watch the test. Sure! I do that all of the time when I am testing. Put it a minute in the future and wait for it to run. > Although there is a hefty pause for the `apt' script, it finishes and > logs are rotated, not what I thought was happening. It would still be interesting to know why apt is taking so long. Is it taking a long time due to the random sleep? What does this say for you? For me there is no output and the sleep is not configured. apt-config shell FOO APT::Periodic::RandomSleep > So it seems to indicate that anacron is the problem.... but no, > there's more. > > Then I switched the /etc/crontab line again so that anacron was the > only thing on it. And, well, once again hefty pause for `apt' script > but logs are rotated. > > OK, so my problem is solved.... I have no idea what I did to `fix' it, > but it was totally accidental whatever it was. Perhaps restarting cron happened? Perhaps causing cron to re-read the crontab was enough to reset cron? Since it almost seems that cron was not running previously. > Rotation is apparently working as it should. Yay. Good. Bob
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