Bizarre Anacron permissions error

rollo · 11-11-2006, 08:33 PM

I'm having strange difficulty getting anacron to run. It's Apt-installed and "preconfigured" so normally I wouldn't need to fiddle with things on such a simple program. But check this out (from syslog of boot):

Code:

Nov 12 01:17:01 KanotixBox /USR/SBIN/CRON[5196]: (root) CMD (   run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly)
Nov 12 01:18:41 KanotixBox anacron[5504]: Anacron 2.3 started on 2006-11-12
Nov 12 01:18:41 KanotixBox anacron[5504]: Can't open timestamp file for job cron.daily: Permission denied
Nov 12 01:18:41 KanotixBox anacron[5504]: Aborted

And, from the command line:

Code:

rollo@KanotixBox:~$ anacron -d
Anacron 2.3 started on 2006-11-12
anacron: Can't open timestamp file for job cron.daily: Permission denied
anacron: Aborted

I can chown the /var/spool/anacron directory and make it run - but just once, and this doesn't seem the right solution.

What could be going on here?

blackhole54 · 11-12-2006, 01:12 AM

Are you running anacron as root?

rollo · 11-12-2006, 04:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by blackhole54

Are you running anacron as root?

No, I was trying not to do that - but of course, you're right, it must be run as root. So there is nothing bizarre about this at all!

But anacron still isn't running at boot. This seems to be because it is called by the cron.daily/weekly/monthly scripts... and these are scheduled for when the machine is switched off! Isn't this the problem that anacron was trying to solve?

So how do I get anacron to run only at startup? Putting it in /etc/rc5.d doesn't work - I guess because it's not a daemon.

This is all very strange. Normally anacron is supposed to "just work".

blackhole54 · 11-12-2006, 11:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rollo

But anacron still isn't running at boot. This seems to be because it is called by the cron.daily/weekly/monthly scripts... and these are scheduled for when the machine is switched off! Isn't this the problem that anacron was trying to solve?

So how do I get anacron to run only at startup? Putting it in /etc/rc5.d doesn't work - I guess because it's not a daemon.

By default anacron does fork to the background. But trying to run it directly from a runlevel directory will get it called with a start parameter which it probably wont't like! I believe the normal way to do this is to create a script which calls it and create a symlink in /etc/rc5.d to that script. Are you sure Debian doesn't already have such a script in /etc/init.d? You could also start it from your rc.local script.

FWIW, I have a system that is frequently down, running different distros/OS's etc where I have anacron called at startup and when coming out of suspend to make sure things get run and once a day from cron. This is how I run cron.daily. I did it this way because I found it annoying when cron.daily ran twice within a short period of time because cron doesn't know about anacron's timestamps. This way it is guaranteed to run once and only once a day.

rollo · 11-13-2006, 11:44 AM

Thanks blackhole for the advice.

You're correct, anacron is in /etc/init.d. But the Debian apt installation doesn't seem to put any symlinks to it in the /etc/rc*.d directories. This seems strange to me, as the whole point of anacron is that it must run when the machine is turned on, and boot would seem a good place to start...

Anyway, I stuck the link into /etc/rc5.d, and it seems to be running now. However, I'm still suspicious that it has failed to start this way in the past, and (for anyone else struggling with this) there could be a reason: the bit of the anacron init.d script which checks that the laptop is plugged on so as not to drain the battery unnecessarily:

Code:

    if test -x /usr/bin/on_ac_power
    then
        /usr/bin/on_ac_power >/dev/null
        if test $? -eq 1
        then
          log_progress_msg "deferred while on battery power."
         log_end_msg 0
         exit 0
        fi
    fi

Apparently some laptops don't cooperate with that. Seems safe to comment it out if in doubt.

Thanks once more.