Trying to determine why chef-client created a duplicate crontab entry

Chef Infra (archive)
1

Hi,

We recently encountered a situation in which a chef-client run created
a duplicate crontab entry while processing a cron resource. Nothing in
our Chef or system logs suggests what might’ve caused it. chef-client
has executed this particular cookbook hundreds of thousands of times
since we originally deployed it and this is the first such incident of
which we’re aware. We’ve been unable to reproduce it.

We found an old ticket describing the behavior we saw:

Crontab entries get inserted twice, randomly
https://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-1377

This was reported in 2010 against version 0.8.8 and was closed as not
a bug, but we wonder about David Miller’s comment from 31 Dec. 2012
and Bryan McLellan’s response:

http://bit.ly/1eAeHz7

We’re running Chef 11.4.4 on the server and client. The OS is CentOS
5.8 x86_64.

Has anyone else encountered this problem?

Thanks,

Pete

2

On Wednesday, January 15, 2014 at 3:08 PM, lerxst97@gmail.com wrote:

Hi,

We recently encountered a situation in which a chef-client run created
a duplicate crontab entry while processing a cron resource. Nothing in
our Chef or system logs suggests what might've caused it. chef-client
has executed this particular cookbook hundreds of thousands of times
since we originally deployed it and this is the first such incident of
which we're aware. We've been unable to reproduce it.

We found an old ticket describing the behavior we saw:

Crontab entries get inserted twice, randomly
https://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-1377

This was reported in 2010 against version 0.8.8 and was closed as not
a bug, but we wonder about David Miller's comment from 31 Dec. 2012
and Bryan McLellan's response:

http://bit.ly/1eAeHz7

We're running Chef 11.4.4 on the server and client. The OS is CentOS
5.8 x86_64.

Has anyone else encountered this problem?

Thanks,

Pete
The ticket has been reopened. We only closed it because we were unable to reproduce it in our tests and needed more info from someone affected by it to reproduce. If you can gather any evidence that might help us learn the root cause, that would be great. One way to help would be to run chef-client with debug logging and set up some sort of monitoring that would detect the duplicate entries. Debug logging is pretty verbose, so you should make sure you adjust your log rotation accordingly if you do this.

Thanks,

--
Daniel DeLeo