Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2001 18:53:19 -0600 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: Christopher Farley <chris@northernbrewer.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: crontab for root Message-ID: <15000.22399.830335.325684@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <7863846@toto.iv>
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Christopher Farley <chris@northernbrewer.com> types:
> Matthew Emmerton (matt@gsicomp.on.ca) wrote:
> > This means that I have *two* root crontabs - the standard one in
> > /etc/crontab, and my custom one in /var/cron/tabs/root.
> >
> > Is there anything wrong with this type of setup? More importantly, why
> > would you add 'custom' mods to /etc/crontab when you can use 'crontab -e'
> > to update the one in /var/cron/tabs/root? (The advantage I've seen is that
> > when you upgrade, all of your custom mods to root's crontab won't be blown
> > away if you accidentally install the /usr/src version of /etc/crontab.)
> Two crontabs? I think you are being far too simplistic. You ought to
> keep jobs scattered about in root's personal crontab, /etc/crontab,
> *and* in /etc/periodic/*. Why would you want to make life easy for those
> who would inherit your job?
No, no, no - not *nearly* enough. You also want stuff in
/etc/periodic/*, /usr/local/etc/periodic/*, ${PREFIX}/periodic/* and a
few other periodic/* trees.
Realisticly, I:
1) Never touch /etc/crontab (so I don't have to fool with it during
upgrades).
2) Never touch /etc/periodic/* - /etc/periodic.conf is sufficient. If
it isn't, patch things and PR the patch.
3) Put thing in /usr/local/periodic/* by default. That takes care of almost
everything you normally want to do from crontab.
4) The rest goes in crontabs for the appropriate user via crontab -e, though
some users have their own ~/periodic/* setup.
5) Log and document everything.
Note that periodic is a huge step forward! Before it, /etc/crontab (or
roots crontab, depending on your religious preferences) was filled
with long lists of things to do each day/week/month, and you had to
worry about system load and sequencing. By driving all the
daily/weekly/monthly things from one script, you get absolute control
of the sequencing and load. Which is why I encourage users to use
periodic if they have to do more than one thing on a
daily/weekly/monthly schedule.
I'd like to see two changes that I think are improvements: running
weekly & monthly from the daily script, to control when/how it's run;
and providing a hook in the system periodics to run user
scripts. However, others don't seem to agree that these are
improvements.
<mike
--
Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.
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