/etc/cron.daily/apt hangs [solved]

[Derek Broughton]

Markus Schönhaber wrote:

> Daevid Vincent:
> 
> Hm, you're the first one I know of who expects jobs in cron.daily to be
> run precisely at a given time. In my understanding jobs in cron.daily are
> to be run once a day - whenever that may be throughout the day. And since
> those jobs are executed sequentially, it's pretty obvious that any delay
> in one job (be it caused by a sleep like in the apt script, a slow network
> or something else) will affect the execution time of all following jobs.

Hmmm.  Not that obvious - I didn't think the cron jobs waited for one
another at all...
> 
>> "The random sleep was added to avoid that the big archive
>> servers/mirrors get hammered at exactly the same time when a lot of
>> machines are switched on, e.g. 9:00 in the morning. '
>>
>> Who "switches on" a Unix box??! They normally are running 24/7 right?

Ack! I'm afraid you're mostly right, but what a ridiculous waste of energy.
 
> Interesting that you ask this question in an Ubuntu mailing list. Since
> IMO Ubuntu's main success is based on the fact that it provides an easy to
> set up *desktop* Linux.
> And my guess would be that many of those desktops might get switched off
> in the evening and switched back on in the morning. At least, this doesn't
> seem too unrealistic a guess to me.

Even knowing mostly geeks - the sort of people who might be expected to run
a machine 24/7, I don't know many people whose _personal_ machines run
full-time.  

-- 
derek