Hi everybody, What is the best practice when it comes to packages that need to access a network resource in a daily cronjob? Specifically I'd like to have a daily cronjob included in the spamassassin package that will run sa-update. I planned to do this by dropping a con job in cron.daily. As was pointed out in bug 428319, this results in many servers hitting the spamassassin update servers at 6:25 am local time (every server in a timezone that does not have anacron installed). Ideally this should be spread out throughout the course of an hour (at least).
Adding a sleep $[ $RANDOM % 60 ] is probably not a good idea as it will hold up all the other cronjobs that should be run. I imagine it would be relatively simple to have the postinst generate a random time during the day for a cron script to run, but this doesn't work with anacron -- many users would never get updates. What can I do to satisfy those with and without anacron, and to avoid hammering the sa-update servers at a specific time? Thanks! -- Duncan Findlay
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