5 minute cron jobs for mrtg and gate_news

shawn_t · 12-21-2004, 04:47 PM

I have seen one other posting on a similar subject, but the answer didn't really explain what was going on...

I have the following cron entries every five minutes:

(root) CMD (/usr/bin/mrtg /etc/mrtg/mrtg.cfg)
(root) CMD (/usr/lib/sa/sa1 1 1)
(mailman) CMD (/usr/bin/python -S /var/mailman/cron/gate_news)

in /var/log/cron

MRTG is for logging website statistics so I would imagine these are used for that purpose. Is there a way to disable this logging or at least change the frequency?

Can someone give me an explanation of what these are and how to either get rid of them or reduce the frequency?

Thanks in advance.

Electro · 12-21-2004, 06:16 PM

The right syntax in crontab is
*/5 * * * * usr/bin/mrtg /etc/mrtg/mrtg.cfg

cron will run the above every 5 minutes. If you want to understand the above syntax it will be something like
0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * usr/bin/mrtg /etc/mrtg/mrtg.cfg

If you want to disable a schedule place # in the beginning of the line.

Type info crontab at an terminal screen. Then select crontab(5) or other see also entries.

To edit crontab type crontab -e. This will bring up vi and load the crontab for the logged in user.

shawn_t · 12-22-2004, 01:54 PM

Thank you for the reply, but I was more interested in what applications configured these cron jobs and where I might change the frequency or even existance.

I am assuming that since mrtg is a webserver statistics application that is was probably set up when I initialized my apache webserver, but I can't be sure. Also, even though the mrtg cron job appears to be owned by root, it doesn't show up in roots crontab job list.

I did find the gate_news job when I ran:

Quote:

crontab -u mailman -l

but it says:

Quote:

DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall

I investigate further as to where this master is...

Electro · 12-22-2004, 05:23 PM

I just told you how to edit the crontab schedule. Type crontab -e at the terminal or at bash prompt. It will open up vi with the crontab schedule for the user you are logged into.

You can edit the master located in /var/log/spool/cron but the changes will not take effect unless you run the crontab utility with the changed file. Using crontab -e or crontab -e -u user is easier than just edit the crontab file and telling crontab to update the schedule for the desire user.

Usually crontab file is in /etc named as crontab.