Been using Fedora core 3 for a few months, everything appeared okay few issues with cdrecorder etc etc then all of a sudden atd which is running appears not to be able to run anything. Every time I submit something there are no error messages, no load on the cpu to speak of and the file appears in /tmp but nothing happens. Any ideas anyone?

Help much appreciated

Hi,

Is atd not running or is at not working?

ps -ef | grep atd | grep -v grep should show an entry something like this:

at 2927 1 0 2004 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/atd

It is probably running 'cause you do not get any errors when executing an at statement.

What does atq show (btw: atq is the same as at -l).

Thanks for the interest shown

The ps etc command returned

daemon 4644 1 0 Mar08 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/atd

for atd

atq normally shows no entry in the queue but occassionally briefly shows something so it's as if something runs for a short time and then exits - but I can't find anywhere to look for error messages etc. Whatever script I use seems to do the same thing so I don't think it's associated with the application I'm running which as I say has been happily running in the background for some months.

I've also tried restarting atd and killing every process I dare but so far to no avail

Hi,

The output (if any) should be send (by mail) to the user executing the at command.

$ at XX:YY
at> ls -l
at> ctrl-d

The ouput of the above command is mailed to the user

$ at XX:YY
at> ls -l > /tmp/ls.out
at> ctrl-d

The output of the above will _only_ go to /tmp/ls.out, no mail to user.

Did you change the script that is started by at, especially (re)directing of the output it generates?

Thanks again

There is no mail being sent, trying the ls as you suggest also doesn't result in the output in /tmp

It is the same programs running or attempting to run now that ran okay previously so I haven't changed any output redirection etc

Hi,

Last things I can come up with:

Did you take a look at man atd, especially these 2 entries:

1) -l Specifies a limiting load factor, over which batch jobs should not be run, instead of the compile-time choice of 0.8. For an SMP system with n CPUs, you will probably want to set this higher than n-1.

2) WARNING atd won't work if its spool directory is mounted via NFS even if no_root_squash is set.

I do assume there are no at(d) related messages in you logfile(s).

I had the same problem with atd. Lights are on but nobody is home. Goes through the motions (queues the job, unqueues the job) but doesn't run the job and there are no diagnostics in /var/log/cron or /var/log/messages. Went to bugzilla.redhat.com and found the solution to a different atd problem there. Go to http://people.redhat.com/~jvdias/at/FC-3/ and download at-3.1.8-68_FC3.i386.rpm. I upgraded with that and it fixed the problem.

thanks very much, tried it and it works fine

cheers