[Sussex] cron/anacron question

[Gavin Stevens]

Hi all,

I am quite keen to learn more about cron & anacron. I have 2 reasons for
this:

First, every time I use the computer, one or other of these kicks in
after about 5 minutes & does stuff which results in my dial-up
connection becoming very slow (I am usually getting my e-mails at the
time cron/anacron kicks in), although cron/anacron doesn't seem to be
trying to access the web itself.

I have noticed that the xconsole readout talks about leafnode & few
other things. I would like to be able to stop these things from
happening, because it is annoying & I don't use leafnode & the other
things mentioned in xconsole.

Removing such unecessary activity is part & parcel of me tidying up my
system to get it more as I want it, prior to some big upgrading -
namely, compiling a 2.6.x kernel & upgrading Debian.

The second reason is that, despite wanting to stop the seemingly
unecessary activities mentioned above, I realise that cron & anacron can
be very useful & I would be much happier if they were doing something
that I wanted, like backing-up files onto my second hard drive.

If it is of any use, I know that there are daily & monthly versions of
cron & anacron. Am I also right in thinking that anacron would be better
suited to my PC as I always shut the machine down & turn it off when I
am not using it.

So some general pointers would be useful at this stage, which will give
me a better understanding of how these 2 apps function & how to make
them work for my purposes.

Any help gratefully received.

TIA

Gavin.