[gentoo-user] irritating cron habit

[Philip Webb]

I fetch my mail using a user cron job, as recommended for security.
I also start my Internet connection by hand after logging in:
this is to avoid the jam which arises if it is included in the runlevel
but for some reason the physical Net connection isn't functioning,
when Dhcpcd sits there & can't be killed via Control-C.
Usually, this works very well, but occasionally the cron job runs
before the Dhcpcd command has made the necessary connection
-- it depends on when the start-of-minute falls -- ,
which results in a file  ~/dead.letter , which has to be deleted
(the sequence of commands is clear from the Syslog file).

Is there a way to fix this ? -- I could perhaps write a 2-line script
which would run 'dhcpcd eth0 ; /etc/init.d/vixie-cron',
while removing Vixie-cron from the Default runlevel.

Does anyone have useful suggestions ?

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