4 ms·

You can pry my crontab out of my cold, dead hands. Seriously, though, cron has been so utterly reliable for me for so many decades now, it will be really hard

You can pry my crontab out of my cold, dead hands. Seriously, though, cron has been so utterly reliable for me for so many decades now, it will be really hard for me to ever give it up.

bigpeopleareold 4y ago
I seemed to never care until they took my sysvinit away (or maybe any decent init system :D). Then they took resolv.conf control away. Then when I shutdown my computer, some random process takes 1 min 30 seconds to shutdown when it probably doesn't need to. Then I read on hacker news recently that Fedora uses a systemd daemon for handling OOM and the writer said it was terribly misconfigured particularly when it shutdown his X session and all processes related to it when an OOM condition happened. I am not a Linux admin (or at least a sophisticated one so I can look smart with systemd), but now they are taking cron away too? :D I kid about this, in a way, and I know I should accept the inevitable, but I feel like just moving to Devuan on my laptop and use a nice init system, like OpenRC :D
- chasil 4y ago
  Use "halt -fp" if you want to bring your system down in a hurry. It's best to shut down any databases prior to this.
- yawaramin 4y ago
  'Terribly misconfigured' sounds like a bug report should be filed at the distro level, not a complaint about the upstream tool on HN ;-)
  - bigpeopleareold 4y ago
    Hopefully the author did that :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33894469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33894469
eulers_secret 4y ago
This is exactly what happens, just like the old XKCD: Now there are N+1 competing standards. It's why I have to check /etc/profile, ~/.profile, /etc/profile.d/*, ~/.bashrc (or whatever shell), /etc/environment, ~/.env, and a few others I don't even remember to figure out why an $ENVVAR is set. I have to look at two cron-like things to figure out what's scheduled when. systemd-timers has been around and in use for a long while.
dale_glass 4y ago
What's reliable about it? Cron requires manual locking, which results in an old service sometimes aborting without cleaning that up, and then refusing to start ever since. I'm precisely in the middle of an update that's going to throw that out, and just change to a systemd service/timer. Then that problem will go away for good.
sofixa 4y ago
Funnily at my previous job once upon a time the cron daemon crashed for some obscure reason, so the default monitoring template for years afterwards included a check if the cron process is up and running.
phpisthebest 4y ago
"I have always done it that way" is the absolute worst justification for anything. Tradition: Just because you've always done it that way doesn't mean it's not incredibly stupid. -- Despair, inc Every dev and administrator, or office user should have that poster above their desks
- sparker72678 4y ago
  Maybe ask why the fence is there before you try to rip it down.

You can pry my crontab out of my cold, dead hands. Seriously, though, cron has been so utterly reliable for me for so many decades now, it will be really hard for me to ever give it up.

bigpeopleareold 4y ago

I seemed to never care until they took my sysvinit away (or maybe any decent init system :D). Then they took resolv.conf control away. Then when I shutdown my computer, some random process takes 1 min 30 seconds to shutdown when it probably doesn't need to. Then I read on hacker news recently that Fedora uses a systemd daemon for handling OOM and the writer said it was terribly misconfigured particularly when it shutdown his X session and all processes related to it when an OOM condition happened. I am not a Linux admin (or at least a sophisticated one so I can look smart with systemd), but now they are taking cron away too? :D I kid about this, in a way, and I know I should accept the inevitable, but I feel like just moving to Devuan on my laptop and use a nice init system, like OpenRC :D

chasil 4y ago
Use "halt -fp" if you want to bring your system down in a hurry. It's best to shut down any databases prior to this.
yawaramin 4y ago
'Terribly misconfigured' sounds like a bug report should be filed at the distro level, not a complaint about the upstream tool on HN ;-)
- bigpeopleareold 4y ago
  Hopefully the author did that :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33894469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33894469

eulers_secret 4y ago

This is exactly what happens, just like the old XKCD: Now there are N+1 competing standards. It's why I have to check /etc/profile, ~/.profile, /etc/profile.d/*, ~/.bashrc (or whatever shell), /etc/environment, ~/.env, and a few others I don't even remember to figure out why an $ENVVAR is set. I have to look at two cron-like things to figure out what's scheduled when. systemd-timers has been around and in use for a long while.

dale_glass 4y ago

What's reliable about it? Cron requires manual locking, which results in an old service sometimes aborting without cleaning that up, and then refusing to start ever since. I'm precisely in the middle of an update that's going to throw that out, and just change to a systemd service/timer. Then that problem will go away for good.

sofixa 4y ago

Funnily at my previous job once upon a time the cron daemon crashed for some obscure reason, so the default monitoring template for years afterwards included a check if the cron process is up and running.

phpisthebest 4y ago

"I have always done it that way" is the absolute worst justification for anything. Tradition: Just because you've always done it that way doesn't mean it's not incredibly stupid. -- Despair, inc Every dev and administrator, or office user should have that poster above their desks

sparker72678 4y ago
Maybe ask why the fence is there before you try to rip it down.