I’ve had many environments where we get alerts or strange behavior at or about 4 AM – the time that linux’s cron.daily runs by default.
You can change that 4 AM time – perhaps stagger it among groups of servers. You can change it through puppet if you bring /etc/crontab under puppet control, then a simple change can push it out to sections of the environment, and then tune as needed.
The master crontab for this is at /etc/crontab:
[root@s1-jb1000 conf]# cat /etc/crontab SHELL=/bin/bash PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin MAILTO=root HOME=/ # run-parts 01 * * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.hourly 02 4 * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.daily 22 4 * * 0 root run-parts /etc/cron.weekly 42 4 1 * * root run-parts /etc/cron.monthly
just alter the entry for cron.daily away from 4AM…
–doug