<html> <head> <style> P { margin:0px; padding:0px } body { FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY:Tahoma } </style> </head> <body><div style="text-align: left;"><pre>Javier replied: > Oftentimes, Cron is used to setup communication with other servers to > update Clamav or Spamassassin, maybe to run Yum check-update. The > issue is that if everybody is hitting the servers on the hour, we have > instataneous hourly DOS attacks on those servers. The random delay > prevents this by randomizing the access time while guaranteeing that > within the next XX minutes you will run the update. This makes sense for computers not in home environments. James Wilkinson wrote: > Firstly, the 000-delay.cron job should only delay the jobs that are run > from /etc/cron.daily (or /etc/cron.weekly, when a bug is fixed). > Jobs in these directories are run *sequentially* (one after the other) > so a long delay in 000-delay.cron will delay the rest of them. > > Jobs (e.g. those reminding you of football matches) that run directly > from a crontab won't be affected. You can easily have lots of programs > being run at the same time from the same crontab file -- one of them > being run-parts /etc/cron.daily, which is waiting for 000-delay.cron to > finish. But cron won't be waiting, and will still run its other jobs on > time! This is true, James, but my backup script, which I simply drop into /etc/cron.daily IS affected. I just let it run along with the other system jobs and all used to be fine. I had the whole shitload set to run at 10 minutes past the hour and after it was done, I could turn off my computer. Now, I have to either let the computer run for up to 68 minutes, just to guarantee that the jobs even start, let alone finish. I feel the best option to reintroduce full error-free functionality is to disable the delay script.</pre></div> kwhiskerz{ <hr />Stay up-to-date with your friends through the Windows LiveT Spaces friends list. <a href='http://spaces.live.com/spacesapi.aspx?wx_action=create&wx_url=/friends.aspx&mkt=en-us' target='_new'>Check it out!</a></body> </html>