Q:

Cron jobs are disabled on clean installation of 14.04

I have a clean installation of Ubuntu 14.04 and in my /etc/cron.daily/ I see *.disabled files:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 15481 Apr 10 09:04 apt.disabled
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   314 Feb 17  2014 aptitude.disabled
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   355 Jun  4  2013 bsdmainutils.disabled
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   384 Mar 23  2014 cracklib-runtime.disabled
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   256 May  1 08:29 dpkg.disabled
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   372 Jan 22  2014 logrotate
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  1261 Apr 10 06:59 man-db.disabled
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   435 Jun 20  2013 mlocate.disabled
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   249 Feb 16  2014 passwd.disabled
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   349 Dec 27  2012 quota.disabled
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   322 Apr 11 17:58 upstart.disabled

Why is this happening? I want to use unattended-upgrades on my box, but documentation for unattended-upgrades indicates I need to edit /etc/cron.daily/apt file. According to this link I believe that file should exist by default: http://pkgs.org/ubuntu-14.04/ubuntu-main-amd64/apt_1.0.1ubuntu2_amd64.deb.html (and not apt.disabled?)

A:

We encounter the same problem with one VPS server which is hosted at a provider using OpenVZ (https://openvz.org). Another server with fresh 14.04 install (hosted elsewhere) has all cron jobs enabled.
My best guess is that it is a try of the provider to save some system resources.

A:

Further to Ikar's answer, we have also seen this on a VPS provider using https://openvz.org/. 
We addressed it by running this bash script:
for script in $(find /etc/cron.* -type f -name '*.disabled' ! -name '.placeholder*')
do
    mv "$script" "$(dirname $script)/$(basename $script .disabled)"
done

which simply strips all the ".disabled" off the standard cron scripts provided by the VPS host. 

