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Documentation of cron jobs?
Is there any documentation about the cron jobs installed in TurnKey Core and any application specific cron jobs?
I went through the list of them on my TKL 13 Moodle VM and found the following cron jobs:
(Note, the times have been adjusted for my timezone from the UTC one that the webserver is set on...)
1:25 PM
/etc/cron.daily/passwd
/etc/cron.daily/ntp
/etc/cron.daily/logrotate
/etc/cron.daily/apache2
/etc/cron.daily/man-db
/etc/cron.daily/apt
/etc/cron.daily/mysqloptimize
/etc/cron.daily/dpkg
/etc/cron.daily/bsdmainutils
/etc/cron.daily/tklbam-backup
/etc/cron.daily/etckeeper1:45 PM
/etc/cron.weekly/man-dbOn the 17th minute of the hour:
/etc/cron.hourly/moodle
/etc/cron.hourly/hubdns-update9th minute and on the 39th minute of every hour:
(session clean up?)
[ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -ignore_readdir_race -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) ! -execdir fuser -s {} 2>/dev/null \; -delete-x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime (this is a script)
2:23 PM
test -x /usr/sbin/cron-apt && /usr/sbin/cron-apt
Thank you,
leeand00
Replies (5)
Most cron jobs come from Debian packages
Reply 1Question about their run times...
Reply 2Now it appears that the timezone for these jobs to run is GMT-0 (by default?) are these jobs meant to be run when nobody is on the system? Our server runs from a very specific timezone, so we have a pretty good hold on when our users will be accessing it. Does it make sense to switch the times for the cron jobs to run to be when our users are sleeping?
Would make sense with the daily ones.
Reply 3Unless you set the timezone, your server will default to UTC/GMT. But by default the daily cron jobs are generally configured to run during the night. Not that it should be a huge issue; but it makes sense for the cron jobs to run when the system load is lowest.
So the first step IMO would be to set your timezone. It's a really old blog post but should still be relevant. If you have issues, please post back here and I'll try to help out.
Depends on how the applications have been coded & configured
Reply 4Because of the way Linux does things; when you set the timezone; it still uses UTC at a system level; it just shows you your local timezone info. AFAIK it makes both available to apps. That is why you often need to set timezone in applications themselves as well as system (although most Linux desktop apps just default to system).
I would guess that to make everything work how you want it; you may also need to adjust timezone config on your apps (if they are relying on system default and haven't been individually been configured).
Like anything that you tweak on your servers; best practice is to never touch any config unless you 100% know the outcome and/or have a known good (i.e. tested) current system-wide backup (e.g. TKLBAM).
Having said that, it is not uncommon for servers to just use UTC. So just moving the cron jobs might be a better way to go in this instance?
As for pre-seeding, AFAIK it isn't possible to preseed. However it can be scripted (see here).
Setting the timezone
Reply 5You have to be careful when you do that, don't you? I mean the application that I have sitting on top of it will get all confused right? Or am I wrong about that? People do move servers to different timezones...oh I guess this is another question....
Also, can you preset the timezone of the server using preseeding?
/usr/lib is handled by package management so I'd expect that the "maxlifetime" one is a component of the php5 package (or one of the many modules). As for the others it should be fairly self explanatory where they come from.