Support for /var/spool/cron about puppet-cron

[yakatz]

What do you mean by support? If the cron job is managed by puppet, the application user won't get able to modify it because puppet will change it back.

[bschonec]

You're correct. /var/spool/cron/ support would still be nice.

[yakatz]

To be clear, are you are saying you want this module to also duplicate the functionality of the core module and give you the option of which method to use for a job?

[bschonec]

I need the ability to manage /etc/cron.allow, /etc/cron.deny -- which the core module doesn't provide -- and the ability to put the cron jobs in /var/spool/cron/.

My application expects the users' cron job to be in /var/spool/cron/ and if it's not there, the application will create its own cron job. Yes, that stinks and it's poor coding on the part of the application but if I can get Puppet to put the cron job in /var/spool/cron/ then the application complains less.

The application takes hours if not days to configure and set up properly and hasn't been changed since 2017. My users are running BASH scripts to a bunch of setup and if I can Puppetize a good portion of the setup, I can save them nearly 8 hours of configuration and manual setup. Even just the ability to 'crontab -l' or 'cat /var/spool/cron// would be very useful. The users lose the ability to see the application jobs when the jobs are owned by root.

This is a commercial application that I cannot change. It's unbelievable how much effort goes into installing and configuring it.

Perhaps adding a variable called $cronjob_path and defaulting it to /etc/cron.d would be easy enough and not change behavior.

[yakatz]

The user story makes it clear, thanks. I am trying to pull some attention to this on Slack/libera so we can decide what to do.

[bschonec]

I'm working on a very rough draft of my ideas in a pull request. The only gotcha I see so far is:

if $default_cron_job_path != /etc/cron.d {
  $path = "${cronjob_path}/${user}"
| else {
  $path = "/etc/cron.d/${title}"
}

[yakatz]

I don't know that /var/spool/cron supports directories - usually there is just a file there.

[bschonec]

I don't know that /var/spool/cron supports directories - usually there is just a file there.

Whoop...my mistake. /var/spool/cron/ is the intended $path.

This is already getting more involved than I expected. The individual jobs will all have to be merged together under a single user's /var/spool/cron/ file. Perhaps this is a lot of work for little reward.

[yakatz]

I am looking at just changing the name of this module to crond which should make it possible to use both

[ekohl]

puppetlabs-cron_core cannot co-exist with puppet-cron so using puppetlabs-cron_core one loses the ability to manage /etc/cron.allow.

I thought cron_core is always present in puppet-agent. I don't see the conflict. You can even deploy it your environment as cron_core without issue.

[bschonec]

My apologies. I did manage to figure out using cron_core and puppet-cron.