[GTALUG] cron scripts **BOOM**

[Alex Beamish]

I know that crontab -r removes the user's crontab, but what's more likely
(based on your content) is that a new version of cron was installed -- and
that process somehow overwrote the existing crontab with what looks like a
default version.

I have a line in my crontab that does a periodic save:

#  2018-1121: 1533: Save the current crontab for later backup
36   8,15   *   *   *   crontab -l >/home/web/crontab.latest

I then use rsync to back that file (and others) up to a safe place.

Alex

On Wed, Jan 9, 2019 at 11:45 AM Darryl Moore via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

> so I have about 100 servers running 16.04 spread over North America.
>
> Today it became apparent that the root user cron script was deleted on
> all 100 of them. The script is at /var/spool/cron/crontab/root and
> everything I had has been deleted and replaced with
>
> # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall.
> # (- installed on Fri Dec 28 08:18:31 2018)
> # (Cron version -- $Id: crontab.c,v 2.13 1994/01/17 03:20:37 vixie Exp $)
>
> crontabs were all originally installed using the crontab executable.
> when I redo it the same way I get the proper crontab file but with this
> above header added. This was never the case before. I do not have
> automatic updates turned on on any of my machines. The date stamp in
> this header is within a few seconds of the above on all my machines. I
> also have a few machines running Armbian, and they are exactly the same.
>
> This is a major F*up for me and I have no idea how it happened. Has
> anybody else had similar experiences? I'd love to know.
>
> regards,
> darryl
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>


-- 
Alex Beamish

Software Developer / https://ca.linkedin.com/in/alex-beamish-5111ba3
Speaker Wrangler / Toronto Perlmongers / http://to.pm.org/
Baritone, Operations Manager / Toronto Northern Lights, 2013 Champions /
www.northernlightschorus.com
Certified Contest Administrator / Barbershop Harmony Society /
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