Entries tagged cron

Today I should have been heading down to York, to attend the Bytemark Christmas party. Instead I'm here in Edinburgh, because wind/storms basically shutdown the rail network in Scotland for the morning.

Technically I could have probably made it, but only belatedly and only at a huge cost to my sanity. The train-station was insane with stranded people, and there seemed no guarantee the recently-revived service would continue.

So instead I'm sulking at home.

I had a lot of other things scheduled to do in York/London today/tomorrow, for reasons that will become apparent next week, so to say I'm annoyed is an understatement.

In happier news I'm not dead.

Walking to work this morning was horrific, there was so much wind 70-100mph, that I counldn't actually cross a bridge, on Ocean Drive, because I just kept getting blown into the road. (Yeah, that's a road that is very close to the coast. Driving wind. Horrible rain. Storming sea. Fun.)

I ended up retracing my steps, and taking a detour. (PS. My boots leaked.)

Not a good day. Enjoy some software instead - a trivial HTTP / XMPP bridge.

Tags: bytemark, cron, jabber, weather, wind, xmpp | No comments

I have about 18 personal hosts, all running the Jessie release of Debian GNU/Linux. To keep up with security updates I use unattended-upgrades.

The intention is that every day, via cron, the system will look for updates and apply them. Although I mostly expect it to handle security updates I also have it configured such that point-releases will be applied by magic too.

Unfortunately this weekend, with the 8.2 release, things broke in a significant way - The cron deamon was left in a broken state, such that all cronjobs failed to execute.

I was amazed that nobody had reported a bug, as several people on twitter had the same experience as me, but today I read through a lot of bug-reports and discovered that #783683 is to blame:

• Old-cron runs.
• Scheduled unattended-upgrades runs.
• This causes cron to restart.
• When cron restarts the jobs it was running are killed.
• The system is in a broken state.

The solution:

# dpkg --configure -a
# apt-get upgrade

I guess the good news is I spotted it promptly, with the benefit of hindsight the bug report does warn of this as being a concern, but I guess there wasn't a great solution.

Anyway I hope others see this, or otherwise spot the problem themselves.

In unrelated news the seaweedfs file-store I previously introduced is looking more and more attractive to me.

I reported a documentation-related bug which was promptly handled, even though it turned out I was wrong, and I contributed CIDR support to whitelisting hosts which was merged in well.

I've got a two-node "cluster" setup at the moment, and will be expanding that shortly.

I've been doing a lot of little toy-projects in Go recently. This weekend I was mostly playing with the nats.io message-bus, and tying it together with sinatra.

Tags: cron, debian, systemd | No comments