Ubuntu – Is it safe to uninstall anacron

croncron-jobs

I have my desktop system running continually without shutdown and I want to get normal times (3:01, 4:15, 5:30) for cron.(daily|weekly|monthly) jobs but when anacron is installed these jobs run at around 7:30 and there is seems to be no interval between daily/weekly/monthly jobs.

Is it safe to just remove anacron?

What else could be affected by change from anacron to regular cron?

Best Answer

As long as you don't have any additional schedules in /etc/anacrontab apart from daily, weekly and monthly, it should work out of the box without affecting anything except the runtimes for the daily/weekly/monthly schedules.. The default crontab checks if anacron is installed, and runs the mentioned schedules if anacron is missing from /usr/sbin/.

To be absolutely sure, you could do a soft removal by just stopping the anacron service with service anacron stop and remove test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || from the lines in /etc/crontab. When you are satisfied, you can remove the package.

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Ubuntu – Anacron mailing weird errors

The denyhosts error seems to be Debian Bug #608672. It seems that the logrotate script for denyhosts tries to execute /etc/denyhosts.conf as a shell script to access the configuration variables.

While your configuration file is fine for denyhosts itself, it causes the logrotate script to fail. It looks like the problem has been fixed for the 11.10 release but the fix has not yet been released as an update for 11.04.

You should be able to work around the problem by removing the spaces before and after the equals sign on each line of your /etc/denyhosts.conf file.

Ubuntu – TIme of execution of daily anacron job

I found how to do this and summarized it in my blogpost:

http://opensourceresearchtips.blogspot.com/2012/01/linux-anacron-tips.html

If you want to change the behaviour of anacron to execute as soon as the day changes (and not wait till 7:30 as is the default behaviour) do the following:

gksu gedit /etc/cron.d/anacron

and add the last 2 lines (the last line will restart anacron every hour):

01 0    * * *   root test -x /etc/init.d/anacron && /usr/sbin/invoke-rc.d anacron start >/dev/null
01 0    * * *   root start -q anacron || :
@hourly root start -q anacron || :

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – Anacron mailing weird errors

Ubuntu – TIme of execution of daily anacron job

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