Cron Not Working On Etch
I recently had a system drive crash on a Sarge system, so when I put in
a new drive, I installed Etch (also figuring that will make upgrading
to Lenny easier). Everything seems to have gone well, except for one
point: Cron is not behaving well.
After installing my packages and getting everything to the point where I
wanted it, I did "/etc/init.d/cron restart" just to make sure cron was
running. Then I took my backup crontab file (named ct) for root and
did "crontab ct" and checked it with "crontab -l" and everything looked
fine. Then I did this for the one user on the system as well and it
looked correct. Crontab did not give me any errors at all.
After a day or two, I realized my backups (made regularly by cron
entries) were not in sync, so I did "ps -ax|grep cron"
and /usr/sbin/cron was running. It was 11:58 AM so I added an entry
into the root crontab to echo the date and time into a tmp file at noon
each day into my ct file, then did "crontab ct" and it installed the ct
file. I waited and checked. The test command had run.
I then reinstalled the backup ct file for the one user on the system,
figuring at this point things should be okay. I didn't use a test
command like I did with root -- why would I need to? Also, there's
another point: This user has a program that, if cron is running, pulls
a list of commands from its database once a day and installs them into
its crontab. Its part of a business system with commands it needs to
run at regular intervals. This system has been working flawlessly on
Sarge for several years.
I did check logs and programs were running on time. Then a few days
later, I found out cron was not running the programs anymore. I did
a "crontab -l" and all the entries needed are there for cron. At this
point, even if my program to update cron from the database has
problems, there are still commands for cron to run by this user. Just
to test things, I did "crontab -l >ct" then "crontab ct" and there was
no problem with cron installing those commands again.
Yet it doesn't want to run the commands for this user. Crontab has no
problem with the commands, but cron won't run them as directed.
Any ideas what is going on here?
Thanks!
Hal
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