TITLE: Patching and compiling Dillon's Cron Daemon LFS VERSION: any AUTHOR: Leslie Polzer SYNOPSIS: dcron is a stable cron implementation without bells and whistles. HINT: Contents -------- 1 Why use dcron when there's fcron? 2 Preparing the files 3 Compiling 4 Post-Install 5 Frontends 1 Why use dcron when there's fcron? ----------------------------------- - dcron is SIMPLE: dcron just gives you two binaries, crond and crontab, and consists only of a few source files. - dcron is SMALL: binaries are only about 25k - dcron is MATURE: it is many distributions' default cron and in use since ~1994. - dcron is SECURE: that's the consequence of being simple and mature. - dcron WORKS: fcron only worked for root on my box, no matter how hard I tried. 2 Preparing the files --------------------- Download dcron 2.3.3 here: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/daemons/cron/dcron-2.3.3.tar.gz You will also need this patch I made: http://linuxfromscratch.org/~timothy/misc/dcron-2.3.3.patch Unpack the tarball, put the patch into the resulting folder and cd into it. 3 Compiling ----------- Apply the patch: patch < dcron-2.3.3.patch Now you can do the actual compile and install: make CC="gcc $CFLAGS" make install Last line as superuser. 4 Post-Install -------------- Start the cron daemon from your bootscripts. dcron can only log to STDOUT so add a I/O redirect: /usr/bin/crond -l8 >> /var/log/cron.log 2>&1 '8' is the loglevel. If you want to allow every user to use cron, you're fine now. If you want to restrict access to cron, do: groupadd cron chown root.cron /usr/bin/crontab chmod 4750 /usr/bin/crontab Now add every user that is allowed to use cron to the new group 'cron'. 5 Frontends ----------- If you want a nice GTK frontend to cron (hate to remember those field orders!), look out for 'gcrontab'. There is also a frontend for GNOME and maybe one for the console. Leslie