Comment 16 for bug 27520

On 05/11/2011 12:16 AM, Nathan Stratton Treadway wrote:
> I see that LP: #605123 describes a similar situation when cron is
> started before the likewise-open daemons, while the Debian BTS 512757
> mentioned above relates to NIS users, etc.

I discussed this problem recently with one of the upstart developers.
Unfortunately we didn't get a fix in time for 11.04, but as I recall to
properly fix this we require features in upstart planned for 11.10.

> And even if the startup script order is fixed in all these cases, its
> always possible that the LDAP (or whatever) server will be unreachable
> when a particular machine is started, which presumably could result in
> the same ORPHANing process happening for cron session....

Only when the crontab changes, thereby triggering a rescan by the daemon.

>
> All of which makes me think that perhaps Stephane Chazelas's idea
> (comment #10) about having cron check the validity of the user
> continually, rather than only at startup, makes more sense in modern
> network-based environments....

cron 3.0pl1-117, which is currently pending upload in Debian (after
which it will be sync'ed to Ubuntu), adds detection and recovery for
certain kinds of errors we were missing so far. Theoretically, this
could easily be extended to the ORPHAN case, but I'd have to give this
some more thought (eg: what if ORPHAN is justified, ie the user really
does not exist).