cron runs the daily script twice on Server 10.4.10

[Gary Bernstein]

On Oct 18, 2007, at 4:55 AM, Brian Willoughby wrote:

> Hello,
>
> i have an Xserve with 10.4.10 and it's executing /etc/daily twice  
> instead of once.  This doesn't happen precisely every day, but only  
> misses maybe one day a week.  Something seems to be running  
> periodic a bit early, at 3:14, and then the expected execution at  
> 3:15 occurs.  If there is only one execution on a given day, it  
> seems to always be at 3:15.
>
> Does anyone have a clue whether Apple's cron replacements in / 
> System/Library/LaunchDaemons are buggy?  I see com.apple.periodic- 
> daily.plist and com.vix.cron.plist, as well as  
> com.apple.atrun.plist (but I don't think the latter is involved here).
>
> Could it be that Apple have set up a redundant system and never  
> noticed?  It seems that cron no longer calls the /etc/daily script,  
> so it must be periodic that is tripping up.  I've looked through / 
> etc/periodic/daily and cannot find a problem.  I don't have  
> anything in /usr/local/etc/periodic, nor have I defined local_periodic
>
> weekly and monthly never seem to run twice, and they always run at  
> 3:15, never 3:14
>
> Brian Willoughby
> Sound Consulting
>
>
> P.S.  At first, I noticed that I am getting two messages from the  
> calendar program most days.  Since I installed sendmail on this  
> server and tried to disable postfix, and also since I added a line  
> to /etc/daily.local to call "calendar -a" - I thought perhaps  
> something I had done along the way was making calendar or mail  
> unhappy.
>
> Now I see that /var/log/ has two system.log.#.gz files for each  
> day.  I don't see how anything I did with sendmail or /etc/ 
> daily.local would have caused the log file rotation to happen twice  
> a day.
>

We have seen this occasionally. It kinda goes in spurts. I've talked  
with Apple about it and they said it was a bug in launchd that they  
are working on.

You can take that with whatever grains of salt you want :)

-Gary

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-- "The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more."

-- "I tried, but it didn't work" is a lot better than "I wish I'd  
tried."

         Gary R. Bernstein      	Director of Computer Information &  
Access
         bernsteg at uiuc.edu	Krannert Center for the Performing Arts
         217-244-1038           	College of Fine & Applied Arts - UIUC
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