Understanding the Automatons, Part Two
Pages: 1, 2

The status-named script can be disabled if you are not running a DNS server. If you are running a DNS server, check the output of this script, as it will let you know if your DNS server denied any zone transfers. A zone transfer request from a machine that is not one of your secondary DNS servers may indicate that someone is trying to gather information about your network. For more information on setting up a secure DNS server, you can read the security chapter of DNS and Bind, 4th Edition.

# 470.status-named
daily_status_named_enable="YES"
daily_status_named_usedns="YES"  # DNS lookups are ok

The next script ensures that sendmail's queue is processed at least once per day. You don't have to run this script, as by default sendmail will check its queue every 30 minutes for undeliverable mail and will try to resend any messages at that point.

# 500.queuerun
daily_queuerun_enable="YES"   # Run mail queue

That's it for the built-in daily scripts; let's move on to the weekly scripts. You'll note that you're once again given the option to specify where to send the weekly output, and again, the default is to email it to root.

# Weekly options

# These options are used by periodic(8) itself to 
# determine what to do with the output of the sub-programs
# that are run, and where to send that output.  $weekly_output
# might be set to /var/log/weekly.log if you wish to log the 
# weekly output and have the files rotated by newsyslog(8)
#
weekly_output="root"        # user or /file
weekly_show_success="YES"   # scripts returning 0
weekly_show_info="YES"      # scripts returning 1
weekly_show_badconfig="NO"  # scripts returning 2

The first script cleans out any kvm* files in /var/db. Since I don't have any of these files on my system, I've disabled this script.

# 120.clean-kvmdb
weekly_clean_kvmdb_enable="YES"   # Clean kvmdb weekly
weekly_clean_kvmdb_days=7         # If not accessed for
weekly_clean_kvmdb_verbose="YES"  # Mention files deleted

The next two scripts update the locate and whatis databases; if you've ever heard your hard drive churning around 4:00 on a Saturday morning, this is the reason why. Since locate and apropos are two of my favorite commands, I keep these scripts enabled.

# 310.locate
weekly_locate_enable="YES"   # Update locate weekly

# 320.whatis
weekly_whatis_enable="YES"   # Update whatis weekly

The next script is disabled by default; if you have lots of disk space and read a lot of man pages, you may find that enabling this script speeds up using the man utility.

# 330.catman
weekly_catman_enable="NO"       # Preformat man pages

The next script is also disabled. Enable it if you want to be aware of any files on your system that don't have a valid owner or group.

# 340.noid
weekly_noid_enable="NO"     # Find unowned files
weekly_noid_dirs="/"        # Look here

The last built-in weekly script is interesting, and may be worth enabling if you like to keep up-to-date with the ports tree. It will compare your already installed ports with /usr/ports/INDEX and make a list of which ports have a newer version number and should be updated.

# 400.status-pkg
weekly_status_pkg_enable="NO"   # Find out-of-date pkgs

There is only one built-in monthly script and you are again given the option of where to send its output.

# Monthly options

# These options are used by periodic(8) itself to 
# determine what to do with the output of the sub-programs
# that are run, and where to send that output.  $monthly_output
# might be set to /var/log/monthly.log if you
# wish to log the monthly output and have the files rotated 
# by newsyslog(8)
#
monthly_output="root"            # user or /file
monthly_show_success="YES"       # scripts returning 0
monthly_show_info="YES"          # scripts returning 1
monthly_show_badconfig="NO"      # scripts returning 2

# 200.accounting
monthly_accounting_enable="YES"  # Login accounting

This script will show the accounting statistics gathered by the ac command. If these statistics aren't useful to you, disable this script. We took a look at the ac command in Monitoring Unix Logins.

I hope this article helped to de-mystify the scripts that came with your FreeBSD system. Until next time, happy BSDing.

Dru Lavigne is a network and systems administrator, IT instructor, author and international speaker. She has over a decade of experience administering and teaching Netware, Microsoft, Cisco, Checkpoint, SCO, Solaris, Linux, and BSD systems. A prolific author, she pens the popular FreeBSD Basics column for O'Reilly and is author of BSD Hacks and The Best of FreeBSD Basics.

---

Read more FreeBSD Basics columns.

Return to the BSD DevCenter.