vixie-cron mysteriously not running jobs.

GaijinPunch · 05-16-2012, 10:31 PM

This is a double-post from the gentoo forums where it ran dry. Hoping someone here can help.

Headscratcher. I recently went through the baselayout2 upgrade. Everything seems to work accept vixie-cron. According to /var/log/messages, my jobs are run. However, there is definitely no output from them. I have one simple perl script which should just dump a single line into a file, yet, it doesn't.

I've tried unemerging and re-emerging vixie-cron but to no avail.

Satyaveer Arya · 05-16-2012, 11:39 PM

Can you show us what have you tried and what errors or output you're getting?

GaijinPunch · 05-17-2012, 06:36 AM

Only really tried re-emerging vixie-cron.
Tailing /var/log/messages shows that the scripts are indeed executed. However, even a simple 'echo Hello World > tmp.out' doesn't produce the file -- thus, I've deducted that this is just nuts.

Not sure where else to look. vixie-cron logs to the syslog, which says everything is fine. Yet, it's not. Frustrated.

Note that this took place after I did the baselayout2 upgrade but I followed the instructions and everything else works fine. Not sure if that is the cause or not.

catkin · 05-17-2012, 06:47 AM

The location of the output file from echo Hello World > tmp.out depends on the working directory when it is executed. echo Hello World > /tmp/tmp.out would make it easier to check whether the file had been created.

GaijinPunch · 05-17-2012, 06:18 PM

Sry if that was confusing. I'm actually outputting to a specific spot -- just wanted to give an easy example for clarities sake.

chrism01 · 05-17-2012, 07:01 PM

So, try eg

Code:

5 10 * * * echo "Hello World" > /tmp/tmp.out

and tell us if it appears.
Also look in /var/log/cron, /var/log/messages and check with mailx as the job owner and as root.
cron normally emails at least one of those users if it has a problem.

GaijinPunch · 05-17-2012, 08:10 PM

Hi

I've updated the crontab to have the echo command as above.
I have no /var/log/cron file. cron logs to the syslog (messages) only it seems. The jobs seem to be running.

Code:

May 18 10:01:01 txlnx07 cron[26576]: (paule) CMD (echo "Hello World" > /tmp/tmp.out)
May 18 10:02:01 txlnx07 cron[26866]: (paule) CMD (echo "Hello World" > /tmp/tmp.out)
May 18 10:03:01 txlnx07 cron[27222]: (paule) CMD (echo "Hello World" > /tmp/tmp.out)
May 18 10:04:01 txlnx07 cron[27530]: (paule) CMD (echo "Hello World" > /tmp/tmp.out)
May 18 10:05:01 txlnx07 cron[27971]: (paule) CMD (echo "Hello World" > /tmp/tmp.out)

Didn't have mailx installed. As such, there is none for me now nor root. However, I see this in the log when grepping for cron.

Code:

May 18 10:05:01 txlnx07 cron[27969]: (paule) MAIL (mailed 24 bytes of output but got status 0x0001

That could be something I suppose -- it ran after another specified job though, not my Hello World. I've installed mailx now so I guess we'll see what happens.

GaijinPunch · 05-19-2012, 06:39 AM

Did I find a problem that has stumped the Linux community?

chrism01 · 05-20-2012, 11:52 PM

What did mailx say for job owner and/or root?

Incidentally, in *nix a successful rtn status is usually zero, so '1' is bad.
Read-only target filesystem? Target FS is full?
Ownerships/perms? SElinux?