At 11:13 AM 9/6/2012 -0300, Tomas Cohen Arazi wrote: Tomas - I'm taking the liberty of Cc:ing the devel list (you suggested that you had spoken with some of them) but would thank you for the 'off-list' exchange of emails. I have spent quite a bit of time checking various possibilities/combinations to ensure that a user cron, re-indexing zebra, functions as expected on various combinations of Koha 3.6.x and 3.8.4 on Ubuntu 10.04 and 12.04 (the two current Ubuntu LTS servers) on both 32- and 64-bit boxes. I have come to the conclusion that the use of crontab as outlined in RESULT [B] "rewritten" (see below) is fully functional, is a single "edit" at the time of installation, and could be included with total clarity in INSTALL.ubuntu and on the Wiki. The use of cron.d/koha RESULT [C] "second scenario" is also functional, but requires two edits at install time (and I've included a couple of minor caveats.) I have not looked at the "package", only at various tarballs, so do not know under what conditions either crontab or cron.d may be used. ISTR reading that package and tarball directory structure differs, so am not at all certain how close the two "installs" should or could be maintained. HTH - regards - Paul NOTES: [A] From $ man cron : "cron also reads /etc/crontab, which is in a slightly different format (see crontab(5)). Additionally, cron reads the files in /etc/cron.d: it treats the files in /etc/cron.d as in the same way as the /etc/crontab file (they follow the special format of that file, i.e. they include the user field). However, they are independent of /etc/crontab: they do not, for example, inherit environment variable settings from it." [B] From 3.8.4 INSTALL.ubuntu : 5.2.2 Zebra Indexer Add an entry in Koha user crontab to scheduled added/updated/deleted records indexing by Zebra with this command: <path/to/koha>/misc/migration_tools/rebuild_zebra -z -b -a [C] From <http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Koha_on_Ubuntu> [abbreviated] 3 - Setup the environment variables used by Koha scripts $ sudo gedit /etc/cron.d/koha Add KOHA_CONF=/etc/koha/koha-conf.xml KOHAPATH=/usr/share/koha PERL5LIB=$KOHAPATH/lib (Alternatively ... same result.) $ sudo gedit /etc/bash.bashrc.local Add export KOHA_CONF=/etc/koha/koha-conf.xml export PERL5LIB=/usr/share/koha/lib 5b - Reindexing Choices Option #1: See http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Background_indexing_with_Zebra Option #2: Add a cronjob to index your zebra database. $ sudo gedit /etc/cron.d/koha Add # The cronjobs */5 * * * * koha $KOHAPATH/bin/migration_tools/rebuild_zebra.pl -a -b -z &> /dev/null RESULTS: [B] above does not funtion. It does function if rewritten as: 5.2.2 Zebra Indexer Add a Koha user cron job to schedule added/updated/deleted record indexing by Zebra with this command: $ sudo vi /etc/crontab Append the following lines: KOHA_CONF=/etc/koha/koha-conf.xml KOHAPATH=/usr/share/koha PERL5LIB=$KOHAPATH/lib */1 * * * * koha $KOHAPATH/bin/migration_tools/rebuild_zebra.pl -a -b -z &> /dev/null :x [C] {5b Option 1 - respectfully for Frédéric - not explored "This solution is completly outside Koha"} First scenario: para 3 "cron.d" plus para 5.b Option 2 does not function (probably due to [A]) Second Scenario: para 3 "Alernatively" plus para 5.b Option 2 does function, with two possible caveats: (a) Comparing my notes from various "new installs" versus "sandbox testing edits", I suggest adding 'export KOHAPATH=/usr/share/koha' to .bashrc between the other two en vars (b) For a [user] cron, I prefer to 'export' from /home/[user]/.bashrc rather than /etc/bash.bashrc.local --- Maritime heritage and history, preservation and conservation, research and education through the written word and the arts. <http://NavalMarineArchive.com> and <http://UltraMarine.ca>