Scheduled Tasks

OpenBSD includes scheduled tasks that run once a day, week, and month. These jobs run as root and email the results to root. The daily maintenance script is the most complicated; the monthly script is the simplest.

If a server runs well, I might not log in to it for weeks or even months. In fact, I’ve had a few servers run for more than a year without a human being ever logging in to it. I read the daily reports from the machine and say “Yep, it’s okay,” and get on with my day, confident that what the regular status reports don’t tell me the monitoring system will.

The scheduled maintenance jobs email their results to the local root user, but if no one ever logs in to the machine, no one will see those results. Always set an email ...

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