cron jobs for mlocate and man-db should be disabled

[mrgum]

If you are reporting an issue with AWS Parallelcluster / CfnCluster please make sure to add the following data in order to facilitate the root cause detection:

Required Info:

• AWS ParallelCluster version [e.g. 2.9.0]: 3.1.2
• Full cluster configuration without any credentials or personal data n/a
• Cluster name: n/a
• [Optional] Arn of the cluster CloudFormation main stack: n/a
• Full cluster configuration without any credentials or personal data
• Cluster name:
• [Optional] Arn of the cluster CloudFormation main stack: ami-09b149c7278ece284

Bug description and how to reproduce: Out of the box parallel cluster has mlocate installed and runs daily cron jobs

• updatedb
• update man-db Install parallelcluster and see that locate works :) man-db is probably not worth having on a system with modules installed as these add to MANPATH

Additional context: Any other context about the problem. E.g.:

like any cron based system activity. running updatedb/man-db can impact the performance of running jobs, and affects benchmarking results

I think it would be better if the default were to disable things like this

[enrico-usai]

Hi @mrgum thanks for this suggestion.

mlocate, man-db updates are executed by Anacron, so a suggestion might be to add an OnNodeConfigured custom bootstrap action to disable Anacron in the compute nodes, with a script like the following:

#!/bin/bash
sed 's/^/#/' /etc/anacrontab | sudo tee /etc/anacrontab.tmp
mv -f --backup /etc/anacrontab.tmp /etc/anacrontab

Let me know if it helps, anyway I'm marking it as feature enhancement. Thanks

[francesco-giordano]

AWS-ParallelCluster 3.2.1 Disable cron job tasks man-db and mlocate, which may have a negative impact on node performance.