[Bruce Evans]

On Tue, 29 Apr 2003, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

> In message <20030429112849.T95090 at cheesy.cypherpunks.to>, Lucky Green writes:
> >One of my 5.0 test boxes is spewing these cron emails. Any idea why this
> >might be? (Email addresses modified)
>
> /usr/libexec/save-entropy is a shell script and it pulls in /etc/rc.conf
> and friends.  It's probably something in there that trips it...

This script is in /usr, so bad things happen if /usr is nfs-mounted and the
server is down.  I don't know if this is your problem, but it has the same
effect of generating a lot of emails.  IIRC, the main problems are that cron
usually keeps running while the server is down (although cron is in /usr
too, all the pages needed to run it are normally mapped) and this script
is run too often (every 11 minutes).  So if the server is down for (11 * N)
minutes, cron forks N times and each child waits for /usr/libexec/save-entry
to become accessible.  Then when the server comes back up, a herd of N
save-entropy's run.  save-entropy is a simple shell script that has no
locking, so the herd makes a mess of rotating the entropy files and sends
mails about this.

Bruce