Cron won't start on bootup

[Chet Woods]

Hi there,
I'm having problems with cron not starting when the server is booted. I've looked in the /etc/rc.log file and here's what I get:
Start clock daemon
Output from "/sbin/rc2.d/S730cron start":
----------------------------
cron started
! cannot access fifo queue Sun Jan 28 05:35:45 CST 2001
! ******* CRON ABORTED ******** Sun Jan 28 05:35:45 CST 2001

Any help is much appreciated.
Thanks,
Chet

[James R. Ferguson]

Chet:

Make sure you have a pipe file called: /var/adm/cron/FIFO

If not, do this (as root) to make it:

# mknod /var/adm/cron/FIFO p

...JRF...

[Chet Woods]

There is a FIFO pipe there...any other suggestions?

Thanks.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Chet:

OK. Make sure you have these directories:

# /usr/lib/cron #...a link to /var/adm/cron/
# /usr/spool/cron

Also, make sure that cron isn't being started twice, erroneously. There should only be one startup link to /sbin/init.d/cron in the startup /sbin/rc.d/ directories. Do a quick check of this with:

# find /sbin -name "*cron*"

...JRF...

[Chet Woods]

James,
I checked all of that...and it all looks right...here's what I got when using that find command:
# find /sbin -name "*cron"
/sbin/init.d/cron
/sbin/rc1.d/K270cron
/sbin/rc2.d/S730cron

Thanks,
Chet

[Jitendra_1]

Do a crontab -l and check the crontab file is not empty. Then try starting the cron daemon again.

[Chet Woods]

I have already checked that, and there are entries in the crontab. I can start up the cron daemon after the server is already booted, however, it's just not starting on bootup.

Thanks,
Chet

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Chet:

Hemant's suggestion to stop & restart cron was good. We now know that cron is viable.

Your post showing the entities in /sbin/ with the string "cron" showed what I would have expected.

BUT: Did you match as "*cron*" or just "*cron" as you typed??? If you did with only the one wildcard, please repeat with both.

...JRF...

[James R. Ferguson]

Chet:

Another thing: In /etc/rc.log is there only one reference (the failed one) to cron?

...JRF...

[Chet Woods]

Yes, I ran the "find" command with *cron* - same results. There is in fact, only one cron entry in the rc.log and it is the one I previously reported.

Thanks again,
Chet

[Thomas Kollig]

Have you checked the permission of the FIFO file?

Bye

[Chet Woods]

I have checked the permissions - they look right. Thanks for the feedback.

Chet

[Volker Borowski]

Hello Chet,
well not much left to test.
Check /var/adm/cron/queuedefs, there is even a man on this one. If this is fine as well, I woud suspect, that something in your startup order has been rearanged.
Any files in /sbin/rc* or /sbin/init.d with recently changed timestamps ?
Volker