cron FIFO in mounted spool filesystem

[Jonathan Bayer]

rogerk at sco.COM (Roger Knopf 5502) writes:


>In article <8224 at scorn.sco.COM> I wrote:
>>
>>In article <732 at wshb.csms.com> michaelb at wshb.csms.com ( WSHB Operations Eng) writes:
>>>I'm trying to move my /usr/spool directory to a seperate filesystem on a
>>>second hard disk in SCO XENIX 386 2.3.2.
>>
>>The FIFO is there for crontab to communicate with cron. You can make
>>it in your new filesystem by doing:

>[ useless technical stuff deleted ]

>Chip Rosenthal wisely pointed out that since cron starts before the
>file systems are mounted, my above solution won't work. He suggests
>either to hack /etc/rc.d to reverse the order (and neither he nor
>I recommend doing this) or pick some lower directory than /usr/spool
>(/usr/spool/news) and make _that_ the mounted file system.



There is yet _another_ solution  :-)

I admit it is not the best, but is do-able.  What you have to do is to
create the /usr/spool/cron directory structure on the root filesystem,
as well as having it on the mounted filesystem.  What is a pain is
making sure that both sets of directories are identical, so when you
boot up cron sees a correct file.  I would suggest doing it in one of
two places:

	1.  Modify the shutdown script to unmount the filesystem, mount 
	    it again as /u, and do a "copy -omr /u/cron /usr/spool/cron"

	2.  Modify the rc.d/2/mntfs to first mount the directory in /u,
	    then do a similar copy as # 1, then have a script go through
	    the /usr/spool/cron/crontabs and do a "crontab $..." in
	    order to tell cron about any possible changes.

I would really recommend doing both of these steps in order to avoid
missing anything.  The only problem with # 2 is that it might miss some
"at" jobs.

BTW, since cron is started _just_ before the filesystems are mounted,
would there be a big problem in starting cron _after_ they are mounted? 
I realize that the /etc/rc.d directories are set up in a fairly logical
order, but that order could be moved around a bit without any real
problems.



JB
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