over the past couple years. The most recent came to the general consensus
that this was the best time, but no one actually made the change, so I'll
don my asbestos undies and dive in.
Please note that this time was chosen with input from people in various
countries with various methods and schedules for switching to and from DST.
There is no perfect time to schedule this job that works for everyone, but
this time both A) Works for more people, and B) Causes problems for fewer
people. And, ultimately, you can always change it if you need to.
All periodic sub-scripts <larf> now have their return codes interpreted
by periodic(8). Output may be masked based on variable values in
periodic.conf.
It's also now possible to email periodic output to arbitrary addresses,
or to send it to a log file, examples of which can be found in
newsyslog.conf.
The upshot of it all should be no discernable changes to the default
behaviour of periodic(8).
PR: 21250
This will make a number of things easier in the future, as well as (finally!)
avoiding the Id-smashing problem which has plagued developers for so long.
Boy, I'm glad we're not using sup anymore. This update would have been
insane otherwise.
"hand", changed /etc/crontab to call /usr/sbin/newsyslog every hour
(the entry was there before - but we haven't had any newsyslog until
today :-) and changed /etc/inetd.conf to also contain (commentet out)
entries for rpc.rquotad and rpc.sprayd (taken from NetBSD)
only once an hour instead of every five minutes. This was due to a minute
specification of 0/5 -- which should have been */5. This has been fixed.
Expect your /var/cron/log to grow much faster now.
Further it implements crontab -e.
I moved cron from /usr/libexec to /usr/sbin where most daemons are
that are run from rc. That also gets rid of the ugly path crond
used to have in ps(1) outputs. Further I renamed it to cron, as
Paul Vixie likes it and is done by NetBSD.
NOTE VERY WELL THE FOLLOWING:
1) Systems crontab changed. Every users crontab resides in /var/cron
*EXCEPT* root's. This is a special crontab as it resides in
/etc. Further it is the *ONLY* crontab file in which you specify
usernames. See /usr/src/etc/crontab. This is also done by BSDI's
BSD/386 as far as I know (they provided the patches for it anyway)
2) So you *must* delete root's crontab and reinstall the copy
in /etc from /usr/src/etc.
'Must' is to much: the old installed crontab will work but cron
will also try to 'run' /etc/crontab.
3) Last but not least: cron's logging is now done via syslog. Note
that logging by cron is done lowercase when it logs about itsself
and uppercase when it logs user events, like installing a new crontab.
The default logfile file is the same as before:
syslog.conf:cron.* /var/cron/log
-Guido
Doug Barton
Brian Somers
David E. O'Brien
Peter Wemm
Poul-Henning Kamp
Andrey A. Chernov
Paul Traina
Jordan K. Hubbard
Nate Williams
Thomas Graichen
Sean Vickery
Guido van Rooij
Rodney W. Grimes