<div>Oftentimes, Cron is used to setup communication with other servers to update Clamav or Spamassassin, maybe to run Yum check-update.</div>
<div>The issue is that if everybody is hitting the servers on the hour, we have instataneous hourly DOS attacks on those servers.</div>
<div>The random delay prevents this by randomizing the access time while guaranteeing that within the next XX minutes you will run the update</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Javier<br><br> </div>
<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 1/30/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">kwhiskerz kwhiskerz</b> <<a href="mailto:kwhiskerz@hotmail.com">kwhiskerz@hotmail.com</a>> wrote:</span>
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<div>On the weekend an update to cron came out with this new script: /etc/cron.daily/000-delay.cron<br><br>What it appears to do is to introduce a random length of delay before cron/anacron run.<br><br>What is the point of introducing randomness into a finely tuned system?
<br><br>When one sets up crontab/anacrontab to go off at precisely a certain time, one expects it to run at the time specified, and not at some random time in the next 68 minutes!<br><br>What purpose does this serve?</div>
</div><br>kwhiskerz{<br><br>
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