[Bug 606491] Re: start: Job is already running: anacron

[Malcolm Scott]

This bug is more serious than I thought.  It appears that because of the
aforementioned apt bug (it sometimes never exits when invoked from one
of the cron.daily scripts), anacron has not run any jobs on my system
for the past month.

This is not a good failure mode.  It would be much more safe for anacron
to be allowed to start on subsequent days (perhaps killing it if it is
still going 24 hours later) to minimise the number of jobs missed.  For
example, this seems to be an improvement:

--- cron.d_anacron.orig 2012-03-01 01:31:33.627985854 +0000
+++ /etc/cron.d/anacron 2012-03-01 01:31:42.903921823 +0000
@@ -4,4 +4,4 @@
 PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
 
 #30 7    * * *   root  test -x /etc/init.d/anacron && /usr/sbin/invoke-rc.d anacron start >/dev/null
-30 7    * * *   root   start -q anacron || :
+30 7    * * *   root   start -q anacron || restart -q anacron || :

That doesn't prevent the "job is already running" email being sent out
after a job has frozen, but it will be sent once per stuck job and then
will allow anacron to recover, rather than being sent daily until the
stuck job is manually killed.

Of course, the underlying apt bug should be fixed too, but this will
allow anacron to recover from this and other bugs.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/606491

Title:
  start: Job is already running: anacron

Status in “anacron” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: anacron

  Every day cron sends me this email:

    Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2010 07:30:01 +1200
    From: Cron Daemon <root at hostname>
    To: root at hostname
    Subject: Cron <root at hostname> start -q anacron || :

    start: Job is already running: anacron

  I've tried to find out why it was running twice, but I could only find
  one copy of anacron in the cron directories...

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