Re: Cron fails to run
On Wednesday 05 May 2004 12:23, David wrote:
> Colin Watson said:
> > On Tue, May 04, 2004 at 02:12:33PM -0400, David wrote:
> >> I have two machines with Debian on them. One is pure stable and the
> >> other
> >> is mostly testing.
> >>
> >> Neither machine can successfully run cron.daily. Unlike a previous
> >> poster, anacron is not installed. Various tasks are started but never
> >> complete as shown in the following ps ax listing for cron tasks from
> >> the "stable" machine:
> >>
> >> 6417 ? S 0:00 /USR/SBIN/CRON
> >> 6418 ? S 0:00 /bin/sh -c test -e /usr/sbin/anacron ||
> >> run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily
> >> 6419 ? S 0:00 run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily
> >> 6422 ? S 0:00 /bin/sh /etc/cron.daily/find
> >> 6423 ? S 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/bin/updatedb
> >> --localuser=nobody
> >
> > Perhaps updatedb is trying to read its way veeeeeeery sloooooowly
> > through something like an NFS mount?
> >
> > --
> > Colin Watson
> > [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
> >
> >
> Colin,
>
> One machine has no nfs mounts (all local) and the other has a small nfs
> mount which shouldn't be a problem.
>
> I can manually execute run-parts on the cron.daily directory and it
> completes no problems. There must be some deeper problem with cron
> itself.
>
> I welcome and and all ideas.
>
> Thanks,
> David
>
I had problems similar to this that turned out to be related to a different
daily cron job. I never had the problem of old cron jobs showing up on ps,
though, so your mileage may vary. Anyway, my box is a Knoppix HD install,
and uses smail as the mail agent. It was configured to
run /usr/lib/smail/checkerr as the user mail, even though checkerr is
supposed to be run as root. This error seemed to bork updatedb, which
would stop wherever it was. Sometimes, locate would find things in /usr,
sometimes only in /bin, sometimes in between. I finally fixed the smail
cron error, and I haven't had a problem since.
So to sum up, check your other cron jobs, and make sure they aren't
generating errors.
Justin Guerin
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