This is a unique one that was only solved by Digital support, and seems a
leaves me asking 'Why?'
PROBLEM: We were having a problem with the 'cron' daemon dying. For a
couple of days, it did it at the same time, but then it started dying more
often.
SOLUTION: Again DEC support to the rescue. It ends up the problem didn't
start until someone started running a few cron jobs on their own.
DEC said that 'strange' crontab entries could make the daemon die. Upon
inspecting the crontab file of that 'someone,' I noticed that there were two
commands piped as a crontab entry (something I've never even tried in my
brief Unix admin. career). DEC says this is a no-no because of what cron
has to do in order to catch the output, input, and error of what it runs.
After removing the suspect crontab entries the daemon has been up for 5 days.
PUNCHLINE: The offending crontab entry was put there by a DEC consultant!
Thanks to the following for their replies:
Carter Page <cpage_at_pandora.dccs.upenn.edu>
Bruce Whittaker <bjw_at_ansto.gov.au>
Michael Matthews <matthewm_at_sgate.com>
Paula Ramsay <pramsay_at_admin4.hsc.uth.tmc.edu>
Karl
--
Karl Marble
Unix Administrator & Webmaster
City of Worcester Information Services
Worcester, MA
mailto:marblek_at_city.ci.worcester.ma.us
http://www.ultranet.com/~kmarble (My 'at-work' page isn't finished yet)
Received on Tue Nov 19 1996 - 21:46:45 NZDT