Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 13:40:10 -0700 (PDT) From: Neil Blakey-Milner <nbm@mithrandr.moria.org> To: freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: conf/20498: All FreeBSD systems trigger massive late-night activity at the same times Message-ID: <200008092040.NAA41170@freefall.freebsd.org>
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The following reply was made to PR conf/20498; it has been noted by GNATS. From: Neil Blakey-Milner <nbm@mithrandr.moria.org> To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: freebsd-gnats-submit@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: conf/20498: All FreeBSD systems trigger massive late-night activity at the same times Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 22:39:04 +0200 On Wed 2000-08-09 (13:45), Brett Glass wrote: > >This is a system's administrator's job, surely? > > Sysadmins already have a lot to do manually installing the OS. > Why make their lives harder? It's a policy decision. You have to make it one way or another. It is just as much work either way. > >A gratuitous change > >like this by default will confuse and probably irritate many. > > It's not gratuitous. It does not make sense to have EVERY > FreeBSD server in the same time zone suddenly thrash at the > same time! It's just as reasonable as having them go off on a random time in a three hour period. It's a personal preference. (for example, I know I begin to wonder what's up when one of my machines hasn't sent me mail by 2:13am) > >And I > >personally wouldn't like to have to document it. > > It'd be easy. Simply say that the scripts do a random delay > (which could, perhaps, be turned off via a variable in rc.conf) > and then continue. Or, "If you'd like your runs to be at a somewhat random time within three hours of 2am, you can set this variable...". (It would be in periodic.conf) > >One possible solution is to add a 000.time-wait.sh script to your > >periodic/daily directory, which has "perl -e 'sleep int(rand(180))' in > >it (overkill, I know). > > > >You can change '180' to get a number from a variable in periodic.conf, > >for example. It would default to 0, or something. If you don't want > >_each_ invocation randmomized, then make the number you get from a > >variable in periodic.conf be the exact offset. > > Why not put that random delay right in the daily/weekly/monthly scripts? > Or in /etc/crontab, where it's easy to spot? There is no "daily/weekly/monthly scripts". It is something run by periodic, which means that it takes, in numeric sorted order, all files of name "*.sh" which are executable, and runs them one after the other. A reasonable expectation of 000.time-wait.sh is that it'd be run first. mergemaster would want to eat this change whenever /etc/crontab updated. Very irritating. Neil -- Neil Blakey-Milner Sunesi Clinical Systems nbm@mithrandr.moria.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-bugs" in the body of the message
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