www.nico.schottelius.org/blog/how-cronie-anacron-cron-hourly-daily-weekly-work.mdwn

[[!meta title="Anacron and cronie: How cron.hourly, cron.daily and cron.weekly work"]]

## Situation

We noticed that the [nginx](http://nginx.org/) logfile is not being rotated
on some freshly setup Centos 6.2 servers, which should have been triggered by
logrotate running from cron. The used cron implementation is cronie together
with anacron.

## Background

I first suspected the setup being broken due permissions issues
with cronie, which requires special permissions as found in the
**CAVEATS** section of cron(8):

    The crontab files have to be regular files or symlinks to regular files,
    they must not be executable  or  writable  by anyone  else than the owner.
    This requirement can be overridden by using the -p option on the crond command line.

We had this bug before, but this time it is different:

 * The Logrotate cronjob is located at **/etc/cron.daily/logrotate**
 * The cron.{daily, weekly, monthly} jobs are defined in **/etc/anacrontab**
 * The **anacron** command interprets jobs in **/etc/anacrontab**
 * Anacron is called from **/etc/cron.hourly/0anacron**
 * **/etc/cron.d/0hourly** contains **01 * * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.hourly**

## Solution

In our situation **/etc/cron.d/0hourly** was missing, because we removed all
files from **/etc/cron.d/** and put only our own files in there. The simple
fix is to ensure the contents of this directory are not removed anymore and to 
reinstall the **cronie** package to recreate the **/etc/cron.d/0hourly** file.


[[!tag config sysadmin localch unix]]