debian

Random delay for cron.daily, cron.weekly, cron.monthly

Posted on by Jan

cron-logoWouldn’t it be nice if cron’s daily, weekly and monthly jobs could be run with a slight offset? At least that’s what I thought when 20+ servers were hitting my backup infrastructure at once. The scripts in /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly and /etc/cron.monthly are triggered directly from crontab at fixed times. Here’s what /etc/crontab looks like in Ubuntu Server 16.04:

# /etc/crontab: system-wide crontab
# Unlike any other crontab you don't have to run the `crontab'
# command to install the new version when you edit this file
# and files in /etc/cron.d. These files also have username fields,
# that none of the other crontabs do.

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

# m h dom mon dow user	command
17 *	* * *	root    cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly
25 6	* * *	root	test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily )
47 6	* * 7	root	test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.weekly )
52 6	1 * *	root	test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.monthly )
#

I’ve found several tips which suggested to use a RANDOM_DELAY variable in crontab. Unfortunately, this variable doesn’t seem to be implemented in Debian/Ubuntu’s version of crontab at this time. I even checked the source code, there’s no RANDOM_DELAY variable to be found.

Here’s the solution I came up with. I’m using a combination of sleep and numrandom with a time range between 0 and 30 minutes.

# /etc/crontab: system-wide crontab
# Unlike any other crontab you don't have to run the `crontab'
# command to install the new version when you edit this file
# and files in /etc/cron.d. These files also have username fields,
# that none of the other crontabs do.

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

# m h dom mon dow user	command
17 *	* * *	root    cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly
25 6	* * *	root	sleep `numrandom /0..30/`m ; test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily )
47 6	* * 7	root	sleep `numrandom /0..30/`m ; test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.weekly )
52 6	1 * *	root	sleep `numrandom /0..30/`m ; test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.monthly )
#

In order to use the numrandom command, you have to apt-get -y install num-utils it first.

I didn’t delay the cron.hourly execution but the same sleep/numrandom combo could be used for it as well, just maybe replace the m (minutes) with s (seconds).

Adding a DS3231 Real Time Clock to the Raspberry Pi 3

Posted on by Jan

ds3231-rtcSince the Raspberry Pi 3 doesn’t come with a battery-powered real time clock, it will only show the correct time once it has Internet connectivity (thanks to the NTP daemon). If the Raspberry Pi 3 is not connected to the Internet, you might want to add a hardware clock to set the current date. Here’s how to add a DS3231 real time clock GPIO module to the Raspberry Pi 3 in Raspbian Jessy Lite:

  1. Get a DS3231 real time clock module and install it on the GPIO header of the Raspberry Pi 3 on pin 1
  2. Add the following line at the end of /boot/config.txt in Raspbian Jessy: 
    dtoverlay=i2c-rtc,ds3231
  3. We don’t need fake-hwclock anymore: 
    apt-get purge fake-hwclock
  4. Check/set the current system time and write the system time to the RTC module using: 
    hwclock -w
  5. Set the correct time zone using: 
    dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
  6. Edit /etc/rc.local and add the hwclock command above the line that says “exit 0”: 
    /sbin/hwclock -s
  7. The /etc/init.d/hwclock.sh shell scripts tends to corrupt this RTC clock module. In my case, the RTC clock was set to 2066/01/01 after every reboot. To prevent this from happening, edit /etc/default/hwclock and set HWCLOCKACCESS to no: 
    HWCLOCKACCESS=no
  8. Reboot
  9. Done! Raspbian will now set the time from the RTC clock during boot even if there is no Internet connectivity available.
  10. If RTC corruption is still happening, you may have to get rid of the NTP daemon as well using: 
    apt-get purge ntp
apt-get install ntpdate
  11. After the NTP daemon has been removed, you can still sync the system clock using ntpdate-debian which you might add to /etc/rc.local as well (after the hwclock command though) – just in case there is an Internet connection available during boot. And/or add it to /etc/cron.daily for example.

Raspbian Jessy Lite will detect the DS3231 real time clock module automatically (as a DS1307 module but nevermind), there’s no need to whitelist or blacklist any I2C modules. There’s no need to run the i2cdetect command from the i2c-tools package. Once the clock module is detected, this line should be visible using dmesg:

# dmesg | grep rtc
[    6.640799] rtc-ds1307 1-0068: rtc core: registered ds3231 as rtc0

Check /proc/driver/rtc for more data on the RTC:

# cat /proc/driver/rtc
rtc_time : 19:26:18
rtc_date : 2016-03-25
alrm_time : 00:00:00
alrm_date : 1970-01-01
alarm_IRQ : no
alrm_pending : no
update IRQ enabled : no
periodic IRQ enabled : no
periodic IRQ frequency : 1
max user IRQ frequency : 64
24hr : yes