Busted cron

From: Rick Beebe <richard.beebe_at_yale.edu>
Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2002 12:01:32 -0500

I've got a rather bizarre problem on a Tru65 4.0D box. Cron is busted
for a particular user and I'm not sure why. Here's the entry for the
user staffdb:

# Crontab for staffdb
#
55 5 * * * /usr/users/staffdb/staff_directory.php3 > cron.log 2>&1

The script FTPs a file to another machine and over the weekend I got a
complaint from that machine's admin that he was getting the file every
five minutes.

I made various changes to both the above entry and to the script to
verify that it was that script and that cron was running it. Originally
I thought there must be another script or that it was stuck in a loop.

None of that helped so I removed the entire file (crontab -r staffdb)
and re-created it. That helped somewhat. After that the script would run
at 51 minutes past the hour every hour. No idea why 51 except that it
might be the time that I put in the new file. Then I stopped and
restarted cron. Now the script doesn't run at all.

I'm not seeing any errors. Nothing shows up in staffdb or root's mail.
It also looks like the other cron jobs are running fine. The user is not
in cron.deny. There is no cron.allow.

This problem showed up after an aborted attempt to write a wrapper for
the crontab command. It was aborted because the need changed, not
because it didn't work. We put everything back and, as best I can tell,
all the permissions are set right. I have another 4.0D machine I've been
comparing things to.

Any ideas?

-- 
 
_______________________________________________________________________
    Rick Beebe                                            (203) 785-6416
    Manager, Systems & Network Engineering           FAX: (203) 785-3481
    ITS-Med Production Services                   Richard.Beebe_at_yale.edu
    Yale University School of Medicine
    Suite 214, 100 Church Street South, New Haven, CT 06519
 
_______________________________________________________________________
Received on Tue Feb 19 2002 - 16:55:11 NZDT

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