what to do about crons?

bunder · Bodhisattva Joined: 10 Apr 2004 Posts: 5934

so gentoo's been on a purging spree lately, and they recently decided to disband the cron project, which moved all the cron daemons to maintainer-needed. i can stand behind wanting to get rid of dead, unmaintained wood, but crons aren't exactly something that need updating every week like the java jre does... :lol:

are crons still really relevant in 2019? maybe i'm just the odd person out? is this another reason for me to get on the systemd bandwagon? i'd like to hear people's thoughts on cron usage in 2019.
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eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Apr 01, 2019 4:36 am Post subject:

Gosh I still use vixie-cron. Been trying to use anacron and/or cronie instead, but when I think cron, I think vixie-cron, and all my machines have some flavor of cron.

Server using cron handles keeping /usr/portage up to date, scrubs the RAID, and does a lot of housecleaning.

Though I use systemd on other boxes, those systemd boxes rarely have time based services on them as they are not 24/7 machines.

What's next, getting rid of sys-process/at ? :(
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bunder · Bodhisattva Joined: 10 Apr 2004 Posts: 5934

eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Apr 01, 2019 5:01 am Post subject:

I figure that the services of sys-process/at can be scripted if there is a working cron, so at(1)/atd(8) is superfluous. In fact older unix have the functionality of at(1)/atd(8) as part of cron...

However I'm sure tons of people are still using cron. How are Gentoo development systems dealing with regularly running maintenance scripts? Don't tell me they've all switched to systemd? :o

BTW, we need another systemd poll...maybe...
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The Doctor · Moderator Joined: 27 Jul 2010 Posts: 2678

Crons are vital for backups, virus scan (I know, I know), and other housekeeping. Rather important for functionality.

Sounds like someone is trying to force systemd on the plebs. This is a bad call. We are gaining users who want the freedom not to use it.
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asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8938

Don't be disingenious. Disbanding a project does not mean its packages are being purged, but that individuals can take over package maintainence instead of an unresponsive (dead) project.

bunder · Bodhisattva Joined: 10 Apr 2004 Posts: 5934

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8938

Muso · Posted: Mon Apr 01, 2019 5:24 am Post subject:

Cronie now... mcron before that.
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C5ace · Posted: Mon Apr 01, 2019 6:29 am Post subject:

I maintain 24 systems with cronie installed.
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Maitreya · Guru Joined: 11 Jan 2006 Posts: 441

Always used vixie-cron in the past as that was adviced in the Gentoo manuals I think.
Since a year or so switched to cronie.

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mike155 · Posted: Tue Apr 02, 2019 1:00 am Post subject:

What I really hate is that the syntax of configuration files differs between different implementations of cron.

For example, vixie-cron expects a username in column 6 of /etc/crontab and /etc/cron.d/*. dcron doesn't expect a username in column 6, but the command to be executed... If packages like sysstat write crontab files to /etc/cron.d, either vixie-cron or dcron users will get strange error messages...

I voted for vixie-cron, of course! Paul Vixie is one of our heroes!

krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

vixie-cron, what can i say, it just do the job well

gtwrek · Posted: Tue Apr 02, 2019 6:45 pm Post subject:

I had to poke around to even figure out which one I'm running. I don't recall specifically choosing cronie - probably the default. In any event, of course a cron is required. As long as it works. Be nice if the crontab was the same across all of them, although I modify these sorts of things so infrequently, I'll forget syntax and have to rely on man pages for whatever's installed anyway.

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Tue Apr 02, 2019 7:19 pm Post subject:

My main machine is up 24x7 so I use cron daily.

distfiles and portage to backup storage nightly
fstrim daily/weekly (depending on filesystem)
rsync of filesystem for weekly and nightly backup
updating mlocate db nightly
weekly update man db
hourly check to see if ip (from isp) has changed and let me know if so
setting hwclock nightly (just because :lol:

)
logrotate

vixie-cron, it works and haven't had problems with it, kind of like sysv-init, it may be old but it's simple and it does what's needed
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Tony0945 · Posted: Tue Apr 02, 2019 8:57 pm Post subject:

Fitzcarraldo · Posted: Tue Apr 02, 2019 11:20 pm Post subject:

I use cronie on all my machines. And, yes, cron jobs are still very relevant today.

On a server, I use cronie for automatic periodic tasks including, but not limited to, the following:

- Checking the integrity of multiple RAID 1 pairs.
- Backing up users' NAS files and Cloud files to an external HDD.
- Updating the NIDS rules files provided by the NIDS developer.
- Updating my own NIDS rules files based on the latest unauthorized attempts to access my server.
- Updating the IP geolocation database used by GoAccess (real-time Web log analyser).
- Renewing the digital certificate of my Cloud server.
- Log rotation.
- Updating the mlocate index file.
- Updating the malware detection database in the NAS.

I've had the following trouble with vixie-cron, so I don't use it any more: I use the Web browser bookmarks manager Buku on three Linux machines to sync with a single bookmarks database residing on a Cloud server. Each of the machines also runs a cron job to create a text file of the database output also on the Cloud server, just in case I happen to be using a machine that is not running Buku (e.g. a Windows machine or a smartphone). The three Linux machines were originally using the cronie, cron, and vixie-cron daemons, respectively. However, I found that the text file on the machine running vixie-cron was always truncated. It appeared that somehow vixie-cron was not waiting for the Buku print command in the cron job to finish. So I stopped and disabled the vixie-cron daemon on that machine, uninstalled vixie-cron, installed cronie, enabled and started the cronie service, and everything now works fine. So I now avoid using vixie-cron in any installations.
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Tony0945 · Posted: Tue Apr 02, 2019 11:42 pm Post subject:

Fitzcarraldo, do you have a guide to moving from vixie-cron to cronie? Perhaps on your blog somewhere?
Or is it as easy as unmerging vixie-cron and emerging cronie? What about useflags?
They are different. Are the cronie default flags the way to go?

Fitzcarraldo · Posted: Wed Apr 03, 2019 3:39 pm Post subject:

Tony0945,

Dr.Willy · Guru Joined: 15 Jul 2007 Posts: 547 Location: NRW, Germany

I actually had to look it up, but it appears im using dcron. I remember making that choice, but I don't remember why.

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

eccerr0r · Posted: Thu Apr 04, 2019 1:59 pm Post subject:

There is one problem with stale packages, though I don't know if it applies to any of the crons:

The silly c and libc standards keep moving. Old programs sometimes need patches to compile/link properly as time moves forwards. Ideally someone is applying patches to keep up else they won't build anymore.
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