check vpn status
 

I'm trying to check the status of a vpn connection. The script below works from the console, but fails from crontab. ???

Thanks for any help.

Silly question but do you run it from crontab with root permissions?
Have you checked /var/log/syslog for this job, did the job run at all, or did it fail?

jlinkels

Thanks for the reply, I didn't think about permissions. The script runs and is called from root's crontab, I thought that was sufficient as far as permissions go. However, changing the script to sudo /usr/bin/pon seems to fix things. Is there a better way to go about this?

Did you try setting 'suid' bit for /usr/bin/pon? Perhaps, that should help.

If not, the other simple way of doing this is, run the script in an infinite loop with proper sleep. So the script will be running all the time doing things for you.

Thanks for the reply. Setting suid on pon (itself a script that calls pppd) didn't do the trick. But adding the sudo to the call to /usr/bin/pon works fine, so problem solved. It's still a puzzle why something called from root's crontab fails w/o the sudo. Btw, pppd does have the suid bit set.

If /usr/bin/pon is a script, it is better to call explicitely /bin/bash /usr/bin/pon. In general, use an absolute path on everything in cron.

Did you set rwxr-xr-x permissions for /usr/bin/pon? If not, even root cannot execute it. (Just guessing, too lazy to try it) Anyway, I have stopped by calling scripts depending on #!/bin/bash or #!/bin/sh on the first line. Just call a script with /bin/bash so you are sure that (a) bash is used to execute and (b) you don't have to discover that you forgot execute permissions.

jlinkels