Cron

[Claire Daelman]

We have this alarm on a server S16K-A, Hp-UX 9000, 11.11:
Cron command of root with pid XXX failed

I have no more information, this alarm occured regulary but I can't find with wich cron command it's linked.

Thanks,
Claire

[A. Clay Stephenson]

The first thing to do is login as root and do a crontab -l. This will list all of root's crontab entries to stdout. With any luck, there will be only a few entries (maybe even one) with matching time specifications.

[Claire Daelman]

Hello,

the problem is that's a production server and we have lot of entries. That's why I can't now which command generates this error.

[Martin Johnson]

If you have the output of the cron entries redirected to a logfile, check the logfile(s) for possible errors. If the output is not redirected to a file (it is redirected to /dev/null) modify the cron entries to redirect to a logfile and examine the logfile (one unique logfile for each cron entry).


HTH
Marty

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Atleast you can look at /var/adm/cron/log file and search for this pid. The line that starts with CMD gives you the script/command it started through cron with this pid.

-Sri

[Rich Wright]

Look at /var/adm/cron/log file for any clues.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

Given Clay's first suggestion, I would think that between the tasks associated with 'root' (via 'crontab -l') and the 'var/adm/cron/log' history, that you should be able to match the failure with the task.

Have you tried that?

Regards!

...JRF...

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Ok, Plan B. Look in /var/adm/cron/log for matching PID's.

If Plan B fails then Plan C. Back to the original method. Use crontab -l to find the subset of possible culprits and then start each one that's ok to run now with at.
e.g.
at -f /root/bin/myscript.sh now

The reason you need to do this via at rather than simply running it from the shell is that you want to duplicate cron's sparse runtime environment.

[Claire Daelman]

Thanks. In fact, we have a problem with cronification of backup and it's the cell server that's why we have so many alarms.

[Claire Daelman]

Thanks a lot to everybody. Thanks A.Clay for funny answers...

[Martin Johnson]

A. Clay,

Were your answers meant to be funny? If so, they sure went over MY head!

:-)
Marty

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Beats me too. I had no idea I was being funny; silly me, I thought I was giving perfectly straightforward answers.