Last weekend I upgraded a 1000A 5/400 from 4.0B to 4.0D (incl. patch
duv40das00002-19980717)
Everything seems oke till someone noticed me the anomalous functionality of
cron.
It seems that after the systemstartup of cron it reads the crontab-files in
memory only once. After that moment cron wont reread a modificated
crontab-file for normal users (it does for the crontab-file of root!).
Everytime a normal user modificates his crontab-file (with crontab -e) , the
FIFO get's the correct timestamp of change (this should be the trigger for
cron to reread all the crontab-files, but it doesn't except for the root
crontab-file).
When I stop and start cron, then it takes -off course- the actual
crontab-files.
An additional strange thing is that the FIFO's timestamp changes every 15
minutes (00-15-30-45).
In /var/adm/cron/log you can see that it is only start at systemstartup or by
manual restart.
What is responsible for this punctual change? (is it 'at' like DEC-support
thought)
Why does this trigger not work?
technical info:
---------------
> ls /var/spool/cron/crontabs/
-rwxr-xr-x 1 bin bin 1805 Nov 16 1996 adm
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root system 413 Jan 5 1998 cronuucp
-r-------- 1 root system 1056 Oct 14 13:13 lbs_prod
-r-------- 1 root system 61 Oct 12 14:28 pve
-r-------- 1 root system 1077 Oct 15 10:38 root
-r-------- 1 root system 899 Oct 10 14:47 root.PreMRG
-r-------- 1 root system 625 Oct 15 10:22 sybase
-rwxr-xr-x 1 bin bin 1555 Nov 16 1996 sys
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root system 10 Oct 10 14:48 uucp -> ./cronuucp
>ls -l /var/adm/cron/cron*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root system 33 Dec 9 1997 cron.allow
-rwxr-xr-x 1 bin bin 1741 Nov 16 1996 cron.deny
>more /var/adm/cron/cron.allow
root
lbs_prod
sqruser
sybase
pve
>cron.deny is 'empty'
>more queuedefs
b.50j20n60w
>umask: 022
>ls /usr/bin/crontab
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root bin 40960 Mar 10 1998 /usr/bin/crontab
checksum: 53863 40 /usr/bin/crontab
>ls /usr/sbin/cron
-rwxr-xr-x 1 bin bin 49152 Oct 13 11:10 /usr/sbin/cron
checksum: 64540 48 /usr/sbin/cron
TX
--
===============
Peter van Empel
Tilburg University
Holland
Received on Thu Oct 15 1998 - 10:09:47 NZDT