Re: Package automation in /etc/daily

[Steven Bellovin <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Jan 17, 2010, at 12:14 PM, Julio Merino wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 5:08 PM, Steven Bellovin 
> <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost> wrote:
>> 
>> Maybe the default cron entry should be prefixed with (for ksh)
>> 
>>        sleep $((RANDOM%30))
>> 
>> or some such.  (I'm 100% serious about a random delay, though I'd most 
>> likely suggest building it in to the fetch command or script, activated by 
>> an option used by the cron invocation.  If we really wanted to be kinky, we 
>> could make the option only active if the program were running without a 
>> control tty, i.e., from cron instead of by the administrator.  That's worth 
>> serious consideration, given how often some people (including me) just 
>> cut-and-paste such things from the cron job, since I do it manually seldom 
>> enough that the proper flags aren't in my personal cache...
> 
> The new checks I added are at the bottom of the daily script.  All the
> checks that run before are slow, including a full scan of the hard
> disk, so they will introduce such 30-second variability anyway.
> 
> -- 

Cut-and-paste error on my part, from my tests; I intended to indicate a random 
delay of up to 3600 seconds.


                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb