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4.17. crontabs

An updated crontabs package that adds one enhancement is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
The crontabs package contains root crontab files and directories. Crontab files are used to schedule jobs to be executed by the cron daemon, such as cronie. Crontabs handles a basic system function so it should be installed on your system.

Enhancement

BZ#532157
The cron daemon had no mechanism to manage cron job rescheduling in a shared environment selectively. Therefore, when a large number of hosts attempted to execute their jobs at the same time, a network or server running the jobs could become overloaded. This update modifies the run-parts script to provide cron job randomization. When cron job randomization is enabled and configured, and a cron job fails to be executed at the scheduled time, cron retries to execute jobs after a random interval. The network and server overloading due to too many simultaneous cron jobs can no longer occur.
All users of crontabs are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which adds this enhancement.