Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 10 - INSTALLATION AND ADMINISTRATION 11-05-2007, Installation Manual

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execution is controlled by
/usr/lib/cron/run-crons
.
/usr/lib/cron/
run-crons
is run every 15 minutes from the main table (
/etc/crontab
). This
guarantees that processes that may have been neglected can be run at the proper time.
To run the
hourly
,
daily
, or other periodic maintenance scripts at custom times,
remove the time stamp files regularly using
/etc/crontab
entries (see Example 21.2,
“/etc/crontab: Remove Time Stamp Files” (page 409), which removes the
hourly
one
before every full hour, the
daily
one once a day at 2:14 a.m., etc.).
Example 21.2 /etc/crontab: Remove Time Stamp Files
59 * * * * root rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.hourly
14 2 * * * root rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.daily
29 2 * * 6 root rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.weekly
44 2 1 * * root rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.monthly
The daily system maintenance jobs have been distributed to various scripts for reasons
of clarity. They are contained in the package
aaa_base
.
/etc/cron.daily
con-
tains, for example, the components
suse.de-backup-rpmdb
,
suse
.de-clean-tmp
, or
suse.de-cron-local
.
21.1.3 Log Files: Package logrotate
There are a number of system services (daemons) that, along with the kernel itself,
regularly record the system status and specific events to log files. This way, the admin-
istrator can regularly check the status of the system at a certain point in time, recognize
errors or faulty functions, and troubleshoot them with pinpoint precision. These log
files are normally stored in
/var/log
as specified by FHS and grow on a daily basis.
The
logrotate
package helps control the growth of these files.
Configure logrotate with the file
/etc/logrotate.conf
. In particular, the
include
specification primarily configures the additional files to read. Programs that
produce log files install individual configuration files in
/etc/logrotate.d
. For
example, such files ship with the packages, e.g.
apache2
(
/etc/logrotate.d/
apache2
) and
syslogd
(
/etc/logrotate.d/syslog
).
Special System Features 409