[gentoo-dev] cron

[gentoo-dev] cron

[Bryce Porter]

Hi everyone...

I've been having serious problems with cron. It seems that the default
/etc/crontab is not getting used by crontab. After an initial install, I
ran crontab -e and it was blank, but /etc/crontab had many things in it.

After putting things into the crontab with crontab -e it works, but I have
it setup to run something once every 15 minutes and it runs things once
every 5 minutes instead (according to the docs and #linpeople on
openprojects.net, the contents are correct).

Also, the standard ways of changing the editor invoked with crontab -e do
not work. I tried "export EDITOR=joe" and "export VISUAL=joe" but crontab
-e still failed to run joe instead of vi. I then resorted to moving
/usr/bin/vi to /usr/bin/vi-old and ln -s /usr/bin/joe /usr/bin/vi and then
it STILL tries to invoke vi, but it fails saying "Couldn't open
'/usr/lib/virc'".

Alot of people suggested I switch to vixiecron instead of dcron, because
of thier previous experiences with dcron. I was told vixie
wouldn't have these problems.

I was wondering if there was a way we could switch the default
implementation of cron to vixie so that these problems could be fixed?

Has anyone else experienced the same problems?

Thanks for your time.

Bryce Porter
BP Web Design
bporter@advancenet.net
x86@gentoo.org

Re: [gentoo-dev] cron

[Achim Gottinger]

Bryce Porter wrote:
> 
> Hi everyone...
> 
> I've been having serious problems with cron. It seems that the default
> /etc/crontab is not getting used by crontab. After an initial install, I
> ran crontab -e and it was blank, but /etc/crontab had many things in it.
> 
Yeah, dcron ignores /etc/crontab, you must run crontab /etc/crontab to
get it working.

> After putting things into the crontab with crontab -e it works, but I have
> it setup to run something once every 15 minutes and it runs things once
> every 5 minutes instead (according to the docs and #linpeople on
> openprojects.net, the contents are correct).
> 
> Also, the standard ways of changing the editor invoked with crontab -e do
> not work. I tried "export EDITOR=joe" and "export VISUAL=joe" but crontab
> -e still failed to run joe instead of vi. I then resorted to moving
> /usr/bin/vi to /usr/bin/vi-old and ln -s /usr/bin/joe /usr/bin/vi and then
> it STILL tries to invoke vi, but it fails saying "Couldn't open
> '/usr/lib/virc'".
dcron ignores those variables.
> 
> Alot of people suggested I switch to vixiecron instead of dcron, because
> of thier previous experiences with dcron. I was told vixie
> wouldn't have these problems.

Hrm, you can try the vcron package if you prefere vixicron. But there is
no init.d script for that cron at the moment.
You can copy dcron to cron and replace /usr/sbin/crond with
/usr/bin/cron and things should work. Make sure you run rc-update del
svc-dcron
before you activate the new cron init script.
> 
> I was wondering if there was a way we could switch the default
> implementation of cron to vixie so that these problems could be fixed?

I plan to make all three cron packages usable (fcron,drcon and vcron).
Daniel preferes dcron because it is the simplest one so
it will still be the default.

bye achim~

> 
> Has anyone else experienced the same problems?
> 
> Thanks for your time.
> 
> Bryce Porter
> BP Web Design
> bporter@advancenet.net
> x86@gentoo.org
> 
> _______________________________________________
> gentoo-dev mailing list
> gentoo-dev@gentoo.org
> http://www.gentoo.org/mailman/listinfo/gentoo-dev

[gentoo-dev] Cron

[Thilo Bangert]

Hi,

as there (at least) are two cron implementations in portage, shouldn't 
they provide something like virtual/cron?

how would i otherwise add a cron dependancy to an ebuild?

thanks for your enlightment

-- 
regards
Thilo