[LUNA] (ana)cron question

[Paul F. Pearson]

On RHEL systems, /etc/anacrontab contains entries to run scripts in /etc/cron.daily/, /etc/cron.weekly/ and /etc/cron.monthly:

#  cat /etc/anacrontab
# /etc/anacrontab: configuration file for anacron

# See anacron(8) and anacrontab(5) for details.

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
MAILTO=root
# the maximal random delay added to the base delay of the jobs
RANDOM_DELAY=45
# the jobs will be started during the following hours only
START_HOURS_RANGE=3-22

#period in days   delay in minutes   job-identifier   command
1	5	cron.daily		nice run-parts /etc/cron.daily
7	25	cron.weekly		nice run-parts /etc/cron.weekly
@monthly 45	cron.monthly		nice run-parts /etc/cron.monthly


For reference: http://serverfault.com/questions/135906/when-does-cron-daily-run

----- Original Message -----
> 
> 
> I have several boxen on my LAN, all running some form of linux or *BSD.
> I want some of them to backup configuration files and/or /etc and/or the
> whole root fs for themselves & other LAN boxen periodically, probably
> weekly. I read the man page on my FC14-x86_64 box (soon to be upgraded
> to CentOS-6, so don't start ;-) ) & have a question. It looks like I
> want root to do the backing up so as to have access to all the stuff
> under /etc or /. That box uses anacron to take care of that for the
> system. I want to add to what it is doing, in a fashion which doesn't
> interfere w/ system operations & gets preserved across OS upgrades. I
> kinda expected some sort of crontab.local (following rc.local), but no
> such capability seems to exist. How do I go about scheduling these
> backups for the various machines which will be doing the backing-up,
> starting w/ the linux box ? I am planning to schedule rsync's to do the
> actual backing up, I just need to figure out how to interleave that job
> w/ other stuff the OS is doing on its own, w/o interfering w/ whatever
> else is going on. TIA for any pointers & have a good one.
>