My question was:
is there any good reason why cron would die? it died on my 4.0d box,
which seems to have killed syslog so I have log files now from 8.1.99
until now.
And I received a lot of answers, which I will list at the bottom. It
seems though that the problem had nothing to do with cron at all and
everything to do with my swap running in over committment mode and some
run away mrtg/minivend processes.
From: John P Speno <speno_at_isc.upenn.edu>
Did you run out of swap space? If you are running in lazy swap mode, the
kernel will kill processes to make room for new ones.
From: "Fliguer, Miguel" <M_Fliguer_at_miniphone.com.ar>
Check out in /var/adm/cron/log for lines like :
! MAXRUN (25) procs reached Thu Aug 5 09:27:00 1999
This is a hard-coded limit for the cron subsystem. We had
some occurrences of cron dying and the above message was
almost always present. Our workaround was to reduce the number of
cron jobs (by building shell scripts to put many entries in one).
We're not really sure why, but it worked ...
From: Grant Van Dyck <vandyck_at_zk3.dec.com>
No, there's no GOOD reason, but I have seen it happen. I'm pretty sure
it was a bug which has since been fixed, but I can't say in which patch
kit as I don't work with those. I haven't been running 4.0D for almost 2
years and I haven't seen it in a long time. I never saw in in 4.0E and
I've been running 4.0F for about a year and haven't seen it there
either. Sorry I can't be more specific, except perhaps to let you know
you're not crazy. :-)
If you haven't got the latest patch kits installed you might try that -
or upgrade to a newer version if that's a possibility for you.
From: Rick Beebe <richard.beebe_at_yale.edu>
There's no good reason. Cron kept dying on one of my machines. I
eventually
traced it to a program that I was running from a crontab. I removed the
program and cron stopped getting killed. It wasn't important enough for me
to investigate what was wrong with the program. Perhaps you can correlate
what might be killing it from timestamps on core files or from syslog.
It's not likely that cron killed syslog. Syslog usually runs independently
and is responsible for updating the files in syslog.dated. So they both
died. Maybe one killed the other or maybe both were killed by an outside
source. Hard to tell unless you can do an autopsy on any remains.
From: Therese Morin USEG <tgrise_at_zk3.dec.com>
Hi Becki,
Grant forward this message to me about you having cron dying problems.
Have you tried installing patch #531.00 from the v4.0d BL12 patch kit
(kit #4)? We just released it last week. This patch fixes several
cron and at problems.
http://www.service.digital.com/html/patch_service.html
ftp://ftp.service.digital.com/public/Digital_UNIX/v4.0d/
Becki Kain
beckers_at_furph.com
--
furph, Inc. WWW/Unix/Windows Solutions 734-513-7763 (voice)
info_at_furph.com http://www.furph.com 734-513-7759 (FAX)
Received on Wed Sep 08 1999 - 21:32:07 NZST