cron + ldap = disaster?

[Natxo Asenjo]

Hi,

I have successfully deployed a single sign on solution with openldap, it works great. But, there is a little problem with cron. Everytime one of the users' or system's crontab changes, cron stops working. The number of cron processes skyrockets (within minutes you see it going from 1 to hundreds) and the overall response of the server is badly hit.

I have a solution, which works but it is not really convenient. First I check the number of cron processes:

# pgrep cron

if that is lower than 3/4 (which could happen if several cron jobs run at the same time for different users) I do nothing. Otherwise,

# killall cron
# /etc/init.d/cron start
# /etc/init.d/slapd restart

and all is fine until someone changes his/her crontab.

I found in google that red hat had this issue too in 2000, but it is fixed a long time ago:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=9405

Unfortunately I am not a coder :(. It would be sad though if people would stop using debian in a company environenment because of this poblem.

Ok, that was it.

regards,
J.I. Asenjo