[arch-general] Replace dcron once again?

[Vincent Cappe]

Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> Surely someone can run a git bisect on this issue.  It is a reasonably 
> new occurrence.

Except that the @daily bug only trigger every 24 hours or so. A little
too time consuming for git bisect, i would say.

But, there is a way around this: overriding the libc time() and
localtime() functions with LD_PRELOAD to trick crond into thinking
time passes quicker than it actually do. libfaketime[1][2] can do
this. So you can launch crond with something like this (as root):

# faketime -f '+0 x30'./crond -s /tmp/systabs -c /tmp/usertabs -t /tmp/stamps -d

which will make @hourly happen about every two minutess and @daily about
every 48 minutes. note: using x60 and above will utterly confuse crond
(Not a Bug), so don't do that.

Combine with a crontab like this:
  @hourly  ID=hourly  echo "HOURLY $(date)"  >> /tmp/dcron-test
  @daily   ID=daily   echo "DAILY $(date)"   >> /tmp/dcron-test
  @weekly  ID=weekly  echo "WEEKLY $(date)"  >> /tmp/dcron-test
  @monthly ID=monthly echo "MONTHLY $(date)" >> /tmp/dcron-test

You can then monitor /tmp/dcron-test and see if jobs are scheduled
correctly.

Also the TZ environment variable can be useful (see 'info libc tz').
But, i was not able to reproduce the "@hourly run only once every
two hours" problem with neither TZ=FOO-1BAR-2,N10,N350 , nor
'export TZ=:/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Paris; faketime -f -60d ./crond ... -d'.

So, it seems DST alone is not enough to trigger it. Presumably, it
also depends upon the content of the timestamp files ?

I never saw the @daily bug, personally.

[1] http://www.code-wizards.com/projects/libfaketime/index.html
[2] http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=24381 

-- 
Sent thru gmane, let's see if it works.