> to your cron file that does 'date' and 'date -u'? Set it to run more I haven't seen the problem yet myself, but throw in an "env" too... I've noted (in a bug report in regard to inetd) that doing "apt-get upgrade" with sudo or su with a full *user* environment often means that you end up with an incorrect environment for daemons that get upgraded -- cron is vulnerable to the same bug, and probably amenable to a similar fix: use env - TZ=$(cat /etc/timezone) PATH=/sbin start-stop-daemon ... cron
instead of just using start-stop-daemon... One could argue that the sysadmin should know better; however, it's a mistake that people have been making since the 4.2BSD days (I've seen this with sendmail and $USER on charon.mit.edu when it was a VAX 11/750, and more recently on an otherwise well-managed Solaris box) that I think we should really (1) prevent the problem in the postinst scripts (2) document such... I'll also note that there's perhaps value to getting start-stop-daemon to do the work (with a --base-environment option?) just for consistency, but it *still* means modifying all the postinst scripts, so why wait...