weird cron log

[Mikkel L. Ellertson]

kalin mintchev wrote:
>  hi all...
> 
> i was looking on google. found some unresolved threads...
> 
> the machine is a fedora 3:
> Linux cellphone 2.6.9-1.667 #1 Tue Nov 2 14:41:25 EST 2004 i686 athlon
> i386 GNU/Linux
> 
> looking at the messages log i saw 2 weird things there today:
> 
> 1. there are entries from "Jun 26 17:xx:xx" before entries from "Jun 26
> 16:xx:xx"?!? and entries from "Jun 26 09:36:51" that are in between "Jun
> 26 16:xx:xx" stamped records?!! how is that possible?!?
> 
> and
> 2. each hour after the first minute of it there is something like:
> Jun 26 15:01:01 cellphone crond(pam_unix)[19571]: session opened for user
> root by (uid=0)
> 
> there are no cron.hourly files.. and nothing for crontab -l. so i'm not
> sure what that entry means...
> any ideas?!
> 
> any clarification would be appreciated...  thanks......
> 
> here is a log piece:
> 
If you look at /etc/crontab you will see an entry something like:

01 * * * * root nice -n 19 run-parts /etc/cron.hourly

This is a job that runs every hour at one minute past the hour, and
checks to see if there are any jobs in /etc/cron.hourly. This is the
hourly job you are seeing.

The strange time entries are because for some strange reason some
log entries are in local time, and some are in GMT. Personaly, I
think they should all be in GMT (UTC), but not everyone feels that
way. The mix causes problems for people. It gets more interesting
when DST starts/ends. But people, including me, are more comfortable
reading times posted as local time, so some programs log using it.
But a lot of the kernel functions still log in GMT/UTC.

Mikkel
-- 

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