[chef] Trying to determine why chef-client created a duplicate crontab entry

[< >]

Hi,

We recently encountered a situation in which a chef-client run created
a duplicate crontab entry while processing a cron resource. Nothing in
our Chef or system logs suggests what might've caused it. chef-client
has executed this particular cookbook hundreds of thousands of times
since we originally deployed it and this is the first such incident of
which we're aware. We've been unable to reproduce it.

We found an old ticket describing the behavior we saw:

    Crontab entries get inserted twice, randomly
    https://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-1377

This was reported in 2010 against version 0.8.8 and was closed as not
a bug, but we wonder about David Miller's comment from 31 Dec. 2012
and Bryan McLellan's response:

    http://bit.ly/1eAeHz7

We're running Chef 11.4.4 on the server and client. The OS is CentOS
5.8 x86_64.

Has anyone else encountered this problem?

Thanks,

Pete