crond is repeatedly creating problem

[Kapil Jha]

Hi all
I am wroking on linux system
and I am unable to log in as root
reason being crond is repeatedly creating a new process CROND and this CROND is creating new process again CROND.
when i reboot the machine it works fine for sometime and after that again same issue.
Please help me out
Thanks

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Shalom Kapil,

This is a symptom of a corrupt or badly modified /etc/intitab

I've seen people with cron daemon problems try and use inittab to keep it runing. This is a bad idea. Perhaps compare inittab to a properly working system.

service status cron (or crond)

See what the status is. If its going up and down, there is a problem that could be a lot of things, including corrupted binary and such. In such case, reinstalling cron or copying the binary from another system sometimes helps.

check /var/log/messages for more detail.

SEP

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

which linux distro do you use?
did you change cron configuration recently?

I suggest you to boot your system into single-user level and switch off cron daemon.(in RH and similar you can use "chkconfig" utility)

[Kapil Jha]

Thanks Stevan
Thanks for ur reply problem has been solved
there was some problem with inittab which i have corrected.
Thanks

[Steven E. Protter]

Very glad to help.

Since you are new here to itrc I would like to encourage you to award points for those that helped you.

You will see little counters next to the answers when you click back into this thread.

SEP

[Kapil Jha]

Thanks Stevan...you solved my problem.
Closing