Anacron job 'cron.daily' on opi

In this section we will put common questions that we get, so look here first if you have a question.
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tor
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Anacron job 'cron.daily' on opi

Post by tor » Fri Feb 19, 2016 8:36 am

From time to time there will be emails sent from root with a subject like "Anacron job 'cron.daily' on opi" and we get a lot of support emails on this.

OPI does, if not disabled (which of course is discouraged), a daily check for software updates and if available install these. This job is started by a service called Cron and any text output of the job started by Cron is by default emailed to the root user.

On OPI all emails sent to Root is automatically forwarded to all members of the Admin group and that is most likely the cause for the email ending up in your inbox from time to time.

Most of the time no output of an upgrade is produced, and no emails are sent out, but from time to time there are upgrades that do. These messages are mostly warnings and purely diagnostic and can in most circumstances be ignored. But never hesitate contacting us if you are worried!

We do review all upgrades before we release them to make sure that they should not cause any problems on an unmodified OPI but have decided not trying to block these "false positives" since we then might end up missing any important problems that would otherwise have remained hidden.

We realize that this contribute to some amount of noise and most often makes no sense if you are not a Linux admin or tech guru. But as said earlier we think that the upside is worth the noise.

One way not to get these emails in the ordinary user inbox could of course be to add a dedicated admin user and then only have that user in the admin group moving your day to day user out of the admin group. Then emails would only be sent to this admin user. Then just don't forget to log in as the admin now and then and check the admin inbox!

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