anacron

[Scott James Remnant]

On Thu, 2004-11-11 at 09:55 -0800, Matt Zimmerman wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 11, 2004 at 05:42:54PM +0000, Scott James Remnant wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 2004-11-11 at 09:26 -0800, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > 
> > > On Thu, Nov 11, 2004 at 04:17:05PM +0000, Scott James Remnant wrote:
> > > 
> > > > All anacron does is ensure daily, weekly and monthly jobs (scripts in
> > > > the /etc/cron.*.d directories) get run if more than a day, week or month
> > > > has passed since they were last run.
> > > 
> > > Does anacron ensure that these jobs are not run more than once per day,
> > > week or month?
> > > 
> > Yes, it only considers each job once ... so even if 8 days have past it
> > only runs daily once.
> 
> The CW I heard in the past was that anacron was not a good idea for systems
> which actually _are_ up 24/7, because it would fail to run jobs and/or run
> them multiple times.
> 
I've not seen any instances of that in a *long* time ... it's certainly
running on this box and a quick check of the syslog shows that the jobs
have run at the right times for as long as I have logs.

> That would make it an undesirable default for Ubuntu.  These bugs may have
> been fixed, but they have existed in the past, and possibly anacron has not
> been as well-tested in such environments.
> 
I disagree, all of the bugs you quote are over 3 years old -- the lack
of any recent bugs encourages me.  The software has been tested and the
bugs eradicated, or at least never reproduced except on the submitter's
system.

I think it's a sensible default for both desktops and laptops, which are
both quite often powered down.  We have things like lvm in the default
install despite their non-use for desktops and laptops, we should have
things like anacron in the default install despite their non-use for
servers.

Scott
-- 
Scott James Remnant
scott at canonical.com
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