cron problem

[kwhiskerz kwhiskerz]

On the weekend an update to cron came out with this new script: /etc/cron.daily/000-delay.cron

What it appears to do is to introduce a random length of delay before cron/anacron run.

What is the point of introducing randomness into a finely tuned system?

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!

What purpose does this serve?kwhiskerz{
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[Javier Perez]

Oftentimes, Cron is used to setup communication with other servers to update
Clamav or Spamassassin, maybe to run Yum check-update.
The issue is that if everybody is hitting the servers on the hour, we have
instataneous hourly DOS attacks on those servers.
The random delay prevents this by randomizing the access time while
guaranteeing that within the next XX minutes you will run the update

Javier

On 1/30/07, kwhiskerz kwhiskerz  wrote:
> On the weekend an update to cron came out with this new script:
> /etc/cron.daily/000-delay.cron
>
> What it appears to do is to introduce a random length of delay before
> cron/anacron run.
>
> What is the point of introducing randomness into a finely tuned system?
>
> 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!
>
> What purpose does this serve?
>
> kwhiskerz{
>
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[Jorge]

Javier Perez <pepebuho <at> gmail.com> writes:
> Oftentimes, Cron is used to setup communication with other servers to update

Clamav or Spamassassin, maybe to run Yum check-update.
> The issue is that if everybody is hitting the servers on the hour, we have

instataneous hourly DOS attacks on those servers.
> The random delay prevents this by randomizing the access time while

guaranteeing that within the next XX minutes you will run the update

So someone else has to decide when I have to do my work? I will remove this 
nonesense script. I have a lot of servers, and they do not (for example) 
yumupdate nothing if I don't want to, and they yumupdate when I want them to. I 
am clever enough to put things in the right place.

Let Ms. Marcela decide what is good for you...  I will rename the script to 
0000000000-Marcela.Maslanova.is.clever.than.me and will put a ver big "exit" on 
the first line. :P