Cron - some jobs do not run

[Rob Fisher]

On one server, less then a day after a reboot, the jobs in the crontab of two users did not execute. I checked the syslog for any errors and my E-mail for anything that was kicked out from cron but I did not see any errors that would indicate the jobs themselves failed.

Those jobs also have the error messages redirected to output logs and those logs had not been touched since before the jobs were suppose to have started.

Has anyone seen this before?

[Ken Hubnik_2]

Check the cron log file for errors.
/var/adm/cron/log
Check the cron.allow and cron.deny files.
Check the crontab files for those users.
/var/spool/cron/crontabs

[Chris Vail]

Check that only a single instance of cron is running. Multiple cron's can get very wierd.



Chris

[Brian Bergstrand]

As already suggested, check the cron log file (not syslog). Also, cron e-mails output of jobs to the user who the job is running as, not root; so have your users check their local mail (unless there are aliases setup).

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Rob:

My first guess, given the information provided, is that your reboot simply spanned the period during which your crontask's sould have run (but 'cron' didn't/wasn't); *or* a forced time change occured on the server such that 'cron' "thought" that the time to start your processes had past.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Rob,

What happens when you try to run the commands manually as those users?
Have you checked the /var/adm/cron/log file?
It contains all timestamps regardless of success or failure.

HTH,
Jeff

[Rob Fisher]

I'm sorry I forgot to specify that the cron log files are recycled by a monitoring group that we have. I have also asked the users if the received any E-mail, but they have not.

I did just check to see if there are two instinces of cron running but currently there is only one.

Thank you all for your quick responces. Please let me know if there are any other suggestions.

[Pete Randall]

Rob,

Without the log files, it's going to be hard to tell much of anything. Can you get your monitoring group to either not recycle the log files or save a copy so you can look at them the next time this happens?


Pete