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packaging does not preserve crontab entries

To: PCP Mailing List <pcp@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: packaging does not preserve crontab entries
From: Ken McDonell <ken.mcdonell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2013 08:33:42 +1100
Delivered-to: pcp@xxxxxxxxxxx
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We install crontab entries, e.g.

/etc/cron.d/pcp-pmie
/etc/cron.d/pcp-pmlogger

but we used to install them in different places and/or with different names.

There is some effort to handle migration during upgrades with a mixture of rules and "pre" scripts.

I have just observed a spectacular failure of this.

In upgrading a Centos system from PCP 3.8.0 to PCP 3.8.9, /etc/cron.d/pcp-pmlogger existed before the upgrade (and had been modified), but after the upgrade a new /etc/cron.d/pcp-pmlogger was installed without any warning, and no .rpmnew, ... assistance. So the old /etc/cron.d/pcp-pmlogger was lost.

Worse, the old /etc/cron.d/pcp-pmlogger contained -k 93, so at 00:10 on the day after the upgrade 79 days (93 minus the default 14 for -k) worth of (vary valuable) PCP archives across 50+ hosts were removed.

We have to be able to do a better job of protecting the critical configuration files during upgrades.

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