Arch Linux

nanokatz

Member

Registered: 2014-01-14

Posts: 4

Per User Crontab lost on reboot

Hi Guys and Gals;

I noticed starting sometime in the last few months my user crontabs are being lost on reboot. I have checked that they are not on a tmpfs or other volatile drive. I've searched around but can't find anything that would be causing this.
Any thoughts would be helpful!

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: Per User Crontab lost on reboot

I have no idea why this would be happening, but with cronie (the default cron implementation in Arch), the user crontab lives at /var/spool/cron/$USER.

amckee

Member

From: Cruise Ship Earth

Registered: 2012-02-13

Posts: 25

Website

Re: Per User Crontab lost on reboot

If you're feeling adventurous, I'd chattr the crontab files themselves. Perhaps even the entire /var/spool/cron/ directory, if only just before doing an update that you suspect may do this.

If this tactic doesn't have an affect, it'll be strange. Very strange, which we can look into later. It will, however, most likely make the upgrade fail. When this happens you'll at least have a log file that will say which installer/program/thread/whatever failed to make the change. The only other thing that could happen is that after the upgrade you'll see that the files did not change (as expected), and the installer/upgrade completed while keeping your crons.

The downside, of course, is having to remember to unchatter the files before changing crontabs, then chattring them back.

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