Comment 57 for bug 27520

On Mon, Mar 05, 2012 at 16:38:16 -0000, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Accepted cron into lucid-proposed. The package will
> build now and be available in a few hours. Please test
> and give feedback here. See https://wiki.ubuntu.
> com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to
> enable and use -proposed. Thank you in advance!

I performed the following testing on Ubuntu Lucid x86_64
system running cron 3.0pl1-106ubuntu5 and using
libpam-ldapd/libnss-ldapd/nscld for user
authentication.

I started out by creating a cron job for "ldapuser" that
run every minute, and made sure that "nscd" wasn't
running. (Before these tests I didn't have any
user-level crontabs on this system.)

I confirmed the expected behavior with the existing cron
version:

  # /etc/init.d/nslcd stop
   * Stopping LDAP connection daemon nslcd
  # service cron restart
  cron start/running, process 5259

The expected syslog message "cron[5259]: (ldapuser)
ORPHAN (no passwd entry)" appeared, and as expected the
cron job never started firing, even after I started up
nslcd again a few seconds later.

Then I restarted cron:
  # service cron restart
  cron start/running, process 5280

, and as expected no "ORPHAN" message appeared, and the
cron job fired at the start of the next minute.

Then I stopped nslcd again, configured lucid-proposed
and installed cron 3.0pl1-106ubuntu6.

  # /etc/init.d/nslcd stop
  # aptitude -u
  [...]
  Setting up cron (3.0pl1-106ubuntu6) ...
  cron start/running, process 5465

Syslog still showed the ORPHAN entry in the startup
messages for that instance of cron, and then cron job
didn't fire over the next two minutes. But then I
started nslcd again... and sure enough at the start of
the next minute the cron job did fire, as desired.

After letting the cron job run for a couple minutes, I
rebooted the system, and as it started up cron gave me
the ORPHAN message as usual... but by the start of the
next minute nslcd had already started up, and my cron
job began to fire as expected without any further
effort.

I left the new version of cron running for two nights,
and both mornings the cron.daily jobs ran as expected;
the cron.hourly job shows up in syslog every hour
(though it doesn't actually have anything to do on this
system).

So as far as I can see on this lightly-used system, cron
3.0pl1-106ubuntu6 does fix the ORPHAN problem, and
otherwise continues to work as before.

The only thing that's a little strange/surprising is
that no syslog message is generated when a user's
crontab is moved out of orphan status -- you still get
the ORPHAN message during startup, but no later message
to indicate that the crontab has been "activated"....

Nathan