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".

As you could read in one of my previous posts, I have been investigating my Sagem F@st 3464 modem a little, to see if it ran Linux (which it does). With the help of this topic, I was able to login into the modem with telnet. After entering the password and typing the "shell" command, I was presented an ash shell with BusyBox.

Whenever I login into a new Linux system, I have the habit of executing the uptime command. Doing that, I immediately noticed a load average of 1.00. So I checked with top, if anything was keeping the system busy. And yes, there is a process tr98* using about 100% of the CPU all the time.

To be able to keep some log history of my OpenWRT based router, I want to send it's output to a remote syslog server.

Fortunately I have another machine that is running 24/7, so I don't have to send it over the WAN link to one of my servers in the datacenter. My HTPC is running Gentoo Linux, and I configured syslog-ng as syslog daemon.

Now, by default, syslog-ng does not listen on the "Well Known" syslog port, so we have to configure it to do so. Start with adding a new source to syslog-ng.conf:

source syslog_udp {
udp(port(514));
};


We also need to configure a destination, a file in this case, where syslog-ng will write logging information received on the syslog port:

destination df_wrt0 {
file("/var/log/remote/wrt0.log");
};