Date: 11 Jan 1999 16:28:44 +0100 From: Benedikt Stockebrand <bs_13978_2771@adimus.de> To: Joe Abley <jabley@clear.co.nz> Cc: Benedikt Stockebrand <bs_13969_50203@adimus.de>, Yani Brankov <ian@bulinfo.net>, "Stephen J. Roznowski" <sjr@home.net>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Why is root's crontab different? Message-ID: <sa74spxq15e.fsf@adimus.de> In-Reply-To: Joe Abley's message of "Wed, 6 Jan 1999 00:22:59 %2B1300" References: <199901032313.SAA04829@istari.home.net> <368FFD42.F849603C@bulinfo.net> <sa7ogoengl3.fsf@adimus.de> <19990106002259.B6168@clear.co.nz>
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Joe Abley <jabley@clear.co.nz> writes:
> On Tue, Jan 05, 1999 at 11:45:28AM +0100, Benedikt Stockebrand wrote:
>
> > Aside from that it's a Good Thing[TM] to keep all configuration files
> > in /etc --- putting them in /var will bite you as soon as you have to
> > recover from a disk crash and find out you've never bothered to dump
> > /var (including assorted spools and log files). And /var has a way
> > stronger tendency to get messed up on a system crash than / has.
>
> If you've lost /var, isn't it probably a good thing that cron isn't
> running? You probably have more important things to worry about :)
Cron shouldn't be running because your system should be coming up in
single user mode then.
> Turning your argument around, if it _is_ desirable to have crontabs available
> with a minimal number of filesystems mounted, why not move /var/cron to
> /etc/cron and dispense with /etc/crontab?
Yes, that's an option. Or put the user crontabs into ~/.crontab (with
~root being on the root FS that'd work reasonably well).
The downside is that people expect certain things in certain
directories. If they don't find things where they expect them they
get mighty annoyed (try SuSe-Linux if you don't believe me---I've
learned to hate it at my former job).
> We seem to have taken the same approach with /etc/namedb, which I have
> seen more often located in /var/named... But maybe that's just me. I don't
> know the history of this one.
The standards for named aren't as thoroughly established and with a
secondary server one could argue that the zone files should go to /var
because they aren't configuration.
Personally I keep the boot and primary zone files in /etc and the rest
in /var/named. Since the location of the zone files is configured in
the zone file and the zone file is (usually) given as a boot-time
argument it's way easier to track down than the compiled-in paths in
crond.
So long,
Ben
--
Benedikt Stockebrand Adimus Beratungsgesellschaft für System-
System Administration & Design, und Netzwerkadministration mbH & Co KG
IT Security, Remote System Mgmt Universitätsstr. 142, 44799 Bochum
Opinions presented are my own. Tel. (02 34) 971 971 -2, Fax -9
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