Announcing bcron version 0.08

Version 0.08 of bcron is now available at:
	http://untroubled.org/bcron/
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Changes in version 0.08

- Reordered some things in bcron-exec to provide error emails more often
  when jobs fail to run because of system errors.

- bcron-update internally strips slashes from paths to prevent problems
  with doubled or trailing slashes in arguments.

Development of this version has been sponsored by FutureQuest, Inc.
[email protected]  http://www.FutureQuest.net/
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bcron
Short Description
Bruce Guenter <[email protected]>
Version 0.08
2005-03-30

This is bcron, a new cron system designed with secure operations in
mind.  To do this, the system is divided into several seperate programs,
each responsible for a seperate task, with strictly controlled
communications between them.  The user interface is a drop-in
replacement for similar systems (such as vixie-cron), but the internals
differ greatly.

A mailing list has been set up to discuss this and other packages.
To subscribe, send an email to:
	[email protected]
A mailing list archive is available at:
	http://lists.untroubled.org/?list=bgware

Development versions of bcron are available via Subversion at:
	svn://bruce-guenter.dyndns.org/bcron/trunk

Requirements:

- Needs ucspi-unix (or ucspi-local) to be able to accept user-submitted
  crontabs.

Installation:

- Make sure the latest version of bglibs from
  http://untroubled.org/bglibs/ is compiled and installed.
- Build the sources by running "make"
- Run the "instshow" command to see what will be installed (optional).
- After the package has been compiled, run the following command as root:
	make install
  This command will produce no output if there are no errors.

Configuration:

- Create a system user and group "cron".  This user will own all the
  crontab files.

- Create the spool directory as follows:
  mkdir -p /var/spool/cron/crontabs /var/spool/cron/tmp
  mkfifo /var/spool/cron/trigger
  chown cron:cron /var/spool/cron /var/spool/cron/*
  chmod go-rwx /var/spool/cron /var/spool/cron/*

- Create the configuration directory /etc/bcron as follows:
  mkdir -p /etc/bcron
  You can put any common configuration settings into this directory,
  like alternate spool directories in BCRON_SPOOL.

Operation:

- The scheduler can be started with the following command:
  envdir /etc/bcron bcron-start | multilog t /var/log/bcron &

- To accept crontabs from users, run the spooler:
  envdir /etc/bcron \
  envuidgid cron \
  unixserver -U /tmp/.bcron-spool \
  bcron-spool >/dev/null 2>&1 &

- To update system crontabs, run the updater:
  envdir /etc/bcron \
  bcron-update /etc/crontab /etc/cron.d >/dev/null 2>&1 &

- Sample run scripts are provided for operating the above commands under
  svscan and supervise.

This package is Copyright(C) 2005 Bruce Guenter or FutureQuest, Inc.,
and may be copied according to the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE (GPL)
Version 2 or a later version.  A copy of this license is included with
this package.  This package comes with no warranty of any kind.

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