In package dcron makefile, the per-users directory /var/spool/cron/crontabs is created but not the timestamp directory /var/spool/cron/cronstamps. As a consequence, the cron jobs from /etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.daily,... do not work When crond is run manually we get the error message: no timestamp found (user root job sys-hourly) unable to write timestamp to /var/spool/cron/cronstamps/root.sys-hourly (user root job sys-hourly)
http://www.jimpryor.net/linux/releases is offline. better use https://github.com/dubiousjim/dcron or https://repo.or.cz/w/dcron.git
It's back online, see: https://github.com/dubiousjim/dcron/issues/21
I'm taking this one.
I identified two problems with dcron: 1. The installation creates the required directory /var/spool/cron/ but at run-time /var/spool is by default a symlink to /tmp, which by default is a tmpfs so the installed /var/spool/<foo> directories disappear. This can be solved in the init script as made in package/at/S99at but I'm not sure if it's a reasonable approach, since the directory contents will not persist between reboots. 2. The error messages that should be sent so the console on startup are not shown because crond is started with the "-f" argument via start- stop-daemon in order to create a PID file (see the explanation in commit 994e9fa72e80f8d618393619fefd68f65821144f). In order to solve this problem we must make dcron crate a PID file by itself and run in daemon mode, sending the error messages to syslog. Meanwhile we can just use pidof to PID file.
Partial fix submitted: https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/1134444/
On the subject of the link issue, in our project, we need to apply a patch to buildroot which replaces the symlinks to /tmp by real repositories in the skeletons This patch is still needed despite 0c96bda11 (allow rootfs overlays to override symbolic links) since cron creates a /var/spool/cron directory. Since the rootfs_overlay is made after the make of dcron, /var/spool cannot not be a link in skeleton If the /var/spool repositories were created by the S90dcron script, we would probably not need this patch anymore Regards Dominique Tronche
(In reply to Dominique Tronche from comment #6) As Yann clarified in his review of my patch, "Getting a presistent storage, and customisations of the directory layout to use those persistent locations, can not be done in a generic way. It can only be handled locally, as each one will need to adapt to their own constraints." So I submitted a second patch with a better solution: https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/1134631/
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