Cron, DDclient and CentOS 5.1

metallica1973 · 12-09-2008, 08:06 AM

I am using CentOS 5.1 and am using dynsdns. I have a cron entry that I needs to run every couple of minutes because of an abnormally short IP lease from verizon business dsl account. Here is the cron entry:

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00,10 * * * * root /usr/sbin/ddclient

it is not working and whenever I check the "tail /var/log/cron"

I can see that is not running. What is it that I am not doing correctly and is there some secret to getting this to run. I need it to run every 10 minutes. thanks

colucix · 12-09-2008, 08:16 AM

The crontab entry does not run every 10 minutes, just at 0 and 10 minutes of every hour. To make it run every 10 minutes, you can try

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*/10 * * * * root /usr/sbin/ddclient

Now the silly questions: 1) is the cron daemon running? 2) how did you edited the crontab (crontab -e or whatever)? 3) did you receive any error message in the crontab owner's mail?

Edit: note that the user name (root) in a crontab entry is allowed only if this is the system crontab file (e.g. /etc/crontab).

anomie · 12-09-2008, 12:11 PM

BTW, ddclient runs in daemon mode and already checks for changes every 600 seconds (10 minutes) by default IIRC. That's how my ddclient behaves.

I believe you are just creating work for yourself.

metallica1973 · 12-10-2008, 12:27 PM

I changed this setting from:

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daemon=600

to

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daemon=60

I restarted ddclient

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/etc/init.d/ddclient restart

and it is still not working.

anomie · 12-10-2008, 12:42 PM

Can you post your ddclient.conf? (You'll want to obfuscate your login / password.) Also, did you install ddclient from one of the CentOS yum repos?

metallica1973 · 12-10-2008, 11:01 PM

Actually I installed ddclient from a tar from the dyndns website. As a result of that somewhere during the install it did not create a /var/cache/ddclient directory and was unable to create a ddclient.pid. I discovered this from /var/log/messages. So I created the directory and all is well. So in the end it was the ddclient program and my install. Thanks to all.