anacron

[David Hart]

On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 01:49:13PM +0100, Toby Kelsey wrote:
> I've noticed that for the last four months, monthly jobs get run on the 7th or
> 8th day of the month.
> 
> May  7 13:52:23 localhost anacron[8332]: Job `cron.monthly' started
> 
> On investigation it seems that anacron has a broken design and can't run things
> based on specific date/times.  The way it updates timestamps also means start
> times inevitably drift.

What's broken about it?  It's designed to work that way with a minimum
time granularity of one day.  Times will only drift if you shut your box
off for more than about a day.
 
> The only way of changing the start time appears to be the very hackish and
> undocumented method of changing the mtime of files in /var/spool/anacron/

AFAIU it checks the contents of those files for the last run date, not
the mtime.

> Is there a cron replacement available which copes with daily reboots but runs
> commands asap after their specified time?

david at dev:~$ apt-cache search cron
[snip]
fcron - cron-like scheduler with extended capabilities
[snip]

david at dev:~$ apt-cache show fcron
Package: fcron
Priority: extra
Section: universe/admin
Installed-Size: 652
Maintainer: Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh at debian.org>
Architecture: i386
Version: 2.9.6-2
Depends: debconf (>= 0.5) | debconf-2.0, libc6 (>= 2.3.4-1), libpam0g (>= 0.76), libselinux1 (>= 1.18), debconf, sysklogd | system-log-daemon, exim4 | mail-transport-agent, adduser (>= 3.25), dpkg (>> 1.8.3)
Conflicts: anacron, suidmanager (<< 0.50)
Filename: pool/universe/f/fcron/fcron_2.9.6-2_i386.deb
Size: 175100
MD5sum: 815c67835908baec52398548c1033545
Description: cron-like scheduler with extended capabilities
 Fcron is a scheduler. It implements most of Vixie Cron's functionalities.
 But contrary to Vixie Cron, fcron does not need your system to be up 7 days
 a week, 24 hours a day: it also works well with systems which are running
 neither all the time nor regularly.
 .
 Fcron also includes a useful system of options, such as: run jobs one by
 one, run jobs at fcron's startup if they should have been run during system
 down time, a better management of the mailing of outputs, set a nice value
 for a job...
Bugs: mailto:ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
Origin: Ubuntu

-- 
David Hart <ubuntu at tonix.org>