[solved] Portage syncing on its own? How to disable?

poolshrk · n00b Joined: 26 Apr 2007 Posts: 21

Hi, I have multiple computers so instead of syncing portage on each one I manually mount /usr/portage as an nfs/sshfs file system.

Recently however I have noticed that all of my computers seem to be automatically syncing portage on their own. This is very annoying. Why/how is this happening and how can I stop it?

eccerr0r · Posted: Sat Dec 16, 2017 2:15 am Post subject:

Were these fresh installs or did you inherit these computers? My machines do not automatically sync.

Check your crontabs and ensure you or previous owner hadn't automated it.
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poolshrk · n00b Joined: 26 Apr 2007 Posts: 21

Thanks for the suggestion.

I briefly checked out the crontabs and didn't see anything. It's possible I accidentally synced the wrong computer (multiple times) but it seems to be happening so often and on multiple different computers that it seems unlikely.

I'll look into it more in depth when I get some free time, but though I would ask here first just in case it could save me some time. Thanks again.

szatox · Advocate Joined: 27 Aug 2013 Posts: 3134

ps auxwf will print all processes stacked as a tree for your convenience.
You can find the trigger there, unless it's fire, fork and forget sort of trigger that exists immediately, making PID 1 the parent of its orphaned subprocess.

Perhaps running it from cron (or even in a loop in a terminal) would help you nail it.
Also, grep produces different exit codes when it finds a string you're looking for than when it fails, so you have an easy way to find whether or not a particular dump from ps contains the process you're looking for (hint: grep -B7 -A2 -E '[s]ync' )

limn · l33t Joined: 13 May 2005 Posts: 997

Do you see

Jaglover · Posted: Sat Dec 16, 2017 2:56 pm Post subject:

There can be more than one crontab and there is system crontab. Have you looked at all of them?
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poolshrk · n00b Joined: 26 Apr 2007 Posts: 21

Hmmm...

I may have found it. The other day I installed lynis (security auditing tool) just to check it out, and I just noticed it automatically installed a crontab in cron.daily:

eccerr0r · Posted: Sat Dec 16, 2017 7:06 pm Post subject:

Sounds right. I guess all these things are elective after all; I'm not a lynis user.
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

poolshrk · n00b Joined: 26 Apr 2007 Posts: 21

For others who may run across this issue, it looks like you can disable it by creating the file

/etc/lynis/custom.prf

with the following configuration option

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

FWIW the correct way to check only for GLSAs (which I'm guessing this software is supposed to do but messed up) is "emaint sync --sync-submodule glsa".