anacron: missing, or do you use some other mechanism?

[Martin Maney]

On Sun, Oct 17, 2004 at 07:34:19PM +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:
> No, we do not have another solution. There is a bug about it [1] which
> claims that anacron still has some bugs.
> 
> I don't let any of my desktops run 24x7 (it's a giant waste of energy)

Remote access would keep them up 2/3 of the day anwyay, and they've
acquired other various non-critical services.

> and install anacron on all my machines. It works perfectly for me, but
> if you encounter any bugs, please report them as bug followup.

[after looking at #303, which begins asking the same question I did...
and I thought I checked buggyzilla]  Matt, when did you last see any
problems with anacron?  I don't intentionally run it on machines that
are usually up 24x7, but it's happened plenty often that a box that was
setup with anacron later gets to be left on for any of several reasons,
and I've never noticed any problems from that.

The only bugs I can find about this in Debian are all quite old
(pre-Woody).  The most recent was unreproducible by anyone, including
the submitter, and the only others I found were side effects of a
mistaken fix for other problems, all long since corrected.  My
impression is that the risk is less than the risk of not getting logs
rotated (and eventually purged), but then I have once or twice had
/var filled up by logs, and have never seen any of the reputed bugs in
anacron.

I've installed anacron on the box that isn't yet in service as a
desktop - I've been shutting it down, but I can leave it run sometimes,
too, to see what happens.  It's unlikely I'll have any useful results
in time for Warty's release.  (hmmmm, understatement).

-- 
We found that we were making mistakes due to the complexity.  Then we
wrote scripts to write the configs for us, and using these scripts, we
made mistakes in a faster, more automated manner.  Something needed to
be done.  -- Jeff Allen, A Gentle Introduction to Cricket