Re: cron problem
On Sun 17 May 2020 at 19:14:46 (-0600), ghe wrote:
> On Sunday, May 17, 2020 4:48 PM, David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > OK, I thought you might list both. I'm not actually sure where output
> > goes because I always have MAILTO set, which takes care of it.
>
> Since I don't know what MAILTO is, I suspect I've never had to have it
> set before:-)
>
> I looked around and found 'mailto's (LC) in my amanda config (it
> points at root@localhost -- the amanda cron job script's another thing
> that's missing). But nowhere else.
>
> Is MAILTO an environmental var? There's no MAILTO in 'env' when root
> or backup (the amanda user) or ghe (me). There's a MAIL in the users'
> environments, but I don't think that's what you're talking about. It's
> pointed at /var/mail/<user> anyway.
$ man 5 crontab
I believe the default is to mail to the user running the cron job. On
a "home system", it obviously makes sense to centralise delivery, so
I always include a MAILTO to me at localhost, at the top of every
crontab file. (I always add SHELL to mine too.) Otherwise it might
end up in /var/mail/ rather than my regular INBOX.
> > Have you checked the logs? I see lines in both auth.log and syslog
> > whenever cron jobs run, and even when I just look with crontab -l.
>
> I just looked at syslog and auth, and I don't see anything that looks
> like email in there. And I sent crontab -l earlier -- nothing in there
> either.
>
> What should I see?
auth:
May 17 15:10:01 wren CRON[30876]: pam_unix(cron:session): session opened for user root by (uid=0)
May 17 15:10:05 wren CRON[30876]: pam_unix(cron:session): session closed for user root
syslog:
May 17 15:10:01 wren CRON[30878]: (root) CMD (apt-get -qq update && apt-get -qq -d upgrade && find /var/cache/apt/archives/ -name '*deb')
and the output of the find gets emailed to me, as above.
No output: then no email. (With systemd, you might need the
journalctl command to see your log files.) I'm not sure why
you see nothing: I just stick with the /etc/rsyslog.conf that
the d-i installs from the netinst ISO.
> Never mind, at least for a bit. I just found that the SMTP server is bent...
That's why the logs are valuable. Of course you can test cron without
needing any email output. For example,
* * * * * DISPLAY=":0" /usr/bin/xeyes
makes it pretty obvious whether it's working.
Cheers,
David.
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