cron vs atd

["nate" <debian-user@aphroland.org>]

greetings

I was curious ....I had this problem where I migrated some stuff
to another system, including some crontab entries for a non root uid
user, and the crontabs never got run over the weekend(2 of the
tasks run every 5 minutes, another task runs every minute). I just
copied the crontab file from /var/spool/cron to the new system
(both debian 3.0), to no avail, nothing, no errors, nothing, I could
edit/view the crontab as that user no problem, syslog showed no
errors, infact it did not show it accessing that cron to run it
AT ALL.

So I figured, to delete the crontab and create it from scratch,
I did, and still, same thing, nothing happened. So, I restarted
crontab via the init script AND started the 'at' daemon at the same
time, 5 minutes later the cron script ran!

I checked the first system, no 'at' daemon running(I usually disable
it, since I never thought I needed it ??), so I don't really believe
that atd had anything to do with running my crontab (created with
crontab -e), afterall last I checked atd and crontab have totally
different syntaxes ..but why would restarting cronab "fix" this ??

maybe it's just a fluke and it won't run again in 5 minutes..

the crontab is for my mrtg, runs as user mrtg and updates stats
for about 25 different devices..

thanks for any insight!

nate