Cron jobs
19 January 2004

Summary

Gconf stops on its own; exim should only be run when needed (before using reportbug, say)

Exim

Simple solution: "just stop exim" and remove it from SysV -- it only needs to run if you send e-mail from sigillo, which is almost never -- the only case I can think of is reportbug. So switch it to manual -- "just start exim" if you need it. Now that doesn't stop the cron job from starting it, so you also have to edit /etc/cron.d/exim -- I commented out the active jobs. That may also mean I don't get error messages delived to my mailbox -- we'll see. Exim is really built for servers, not laptops -- you could just remove it.
From /var/log/syslog:

Jan 19 18:23:01 sigillo /USR/SBIN/CRON[3699]: (mail) CMD (  if [ -x /usr/lib/exim/exim3 -a -f /etc/exim/exim.conf ]; then /usr/lib/exim/exim3 -q ; fi)
Jan 19 18:38:01 sigillo /USR/SBIN/CRON[3704]: (mail) CMD (  if [ -x /usr/lib/exim/exim3 -a -f /etc/exim/exim.conf ]; then /usr/lib/exim/exim3 -q ; fi)
Jan 19 18:53:01 sigillo /USR/SBIN/CRON[3709]: (mail) CMD (  if [ -x /usr/lib/exim/exim3 -a -f /etc/exim/exim.conf ]; then /usr/lib/exim/exim3 -q ; fi)
Jan 19 19:08:01 sigillo /USR/SBIN/CRON[3714]: (mail) CMD (  if [ -x /usr/lib/exim/exim3 -a -f /etc/exim/exim.conf ]; then /usr/lib/exim/exim3 -q ; fi)

So every 15 minutes this mail command runs. I don't see where the command is given -- kcron or crontab -e doesn't show it. There is a /etc/init.d/exim file -- but exim may also be running from /etc/inetd.conf. In fact I have this line there:

#:MAIL: Mail, news and uucp services.
smtp            stream  tcp     nowait  mail    /usr/sbin/exim exim -bs

When I issue "just list-files exim" I get (among other things) this:

/etc/init.d/exim
/etc/cron.daily/exim
/etc/cron.d/exim

So that's where it's started. The /etc/cron.daily/exim "cycles logs" -- dumps the old log to /dev/null. The /etc/cron.d/exim has the rest:

# /etc/cron.d/exim: crontab fragment for exim

# Run queue every 15 minutes
08,23,38,53 *     * * *     mail   if [ -x /usr/lib/exim/exim3 -a -f /etc/exim/exim.conf ]; then /usr/lib/exim/exim3 -q ; fi

# Tidy databases
13 6 * * *      mail    if [ -x /usr/sbin/exim_tidydb ]; then /usr/sbin/exim_tidydb /var/spool/exim retry >/dev/null; fi
17 6 * * *      mail    if [ -x /usr/sbin/exim_tidydb ]; then /usr/sbin/exim_tidydb /var/spool/exim wait-remote_smtp >/dev/null; fi
So that's where it is -- in /etc/cron.d. It's the only file there. I guess it would be tidier to do it in crontab, and less frequently.

This stuff is way too complicated for laptop use! All I need is a program that sends mail when (on the very rare occasion) I need it to do so. Now I have to experiment with exim to learn whether you can still send mail if it runs more rarely, or not at all.

Other

# Synchronize the time with spello
0 8 * * *       /usr/sbin/ntpdate spello

You should be running updatedb in /etc/cron.daily -- though this seems to be duplication of the crontab functionality.

Gconf

Another thing that runs all the time is gconfd, from the gconf2 package:

Jan 19 20:04:59 sigillo gconfd (steen-3758): GConf server is not in use, shutting down.
Jan 19 20:04:59 sigillo gconfd (steen-3758): Exiting

I don't see what makes it start, but it does shut down on its own -- the FAQ says "a couple of minutes after the last application using GConf has exited". So it starts whenever some application that uses it starts. It uses these configuration files:
/home/steen/.gconf
/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.mandatory
/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults

This is the Gnome equivalent of the Windows registry, or the .kde registry. It's annoying it runs a daemon, but it's linked to apps and shouldn't bother a sleeping laptop.

Gconf will start when you run any mozilla app.


  

 

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