SLES

cron.daily on SLES

Have you ever noticed that if you put cron jobs in /etc/cron.daily on a SLES machine, they seem to run at random times? I noticed it a few times, and I find it to be really annoying. Say, I rebooted a machine yesterday around 14:00, and today at 14:15, the machine starts rebuilding the man db, backing up the rpm db, cleaning /tmp, rotating logs, etc. Huh?! Looks like a bad idea to do such things when the system is currently in use by multiple people. Imagine that you put a database backup in there, and that backup locks your database...

Well, this actually is a feature. If you read /etc/sysconfig/cron, you'll find this piece of text:

# At which time cron.daily should start. Default is 15 minutes after booting
# the system. Example setting would be "14:00".

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SLES10 and Xvfb

Recently I needed to run an application that needs X on a server running SLES10. Because it wasn't necessary to have the application output anything on a screen, the X virtual framebuffer was sufficient to accomplish this. You can easily install the X virtual framebuffer, which comes with the xvfb package in SLES10.
yast -i xorg-x11-Xvfb xorg-x11

Installing the xvfb package is sufficient to start the X virtual framebuffer server, but the application I needed to run also needed some fonts. So, I installed some extra packages as well with yast.
yast -i xorg-x11-fonts-100dpi xorg-x11-fonts-75dpi xorg-x11-fonts-scalable bitstream-vera fonts-config

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