crontab file being deleted...

[Houston Kemper]

Hi all,

I've noticed that after a reboot on an L 2000 that one of my user's crontab files is being deleted from var/spool/crontabs. The crontabs for root, oracle, and adm remain untouched.

Any thoughts? I haven't located anything in the syslog or anywhere else that might shed some light on this matter.

Thanks in advance,

[Patrick Wallek]

The first thing that comes to mind is to go through your startup scripts in /sbin/init.d and look for anything related to cron. The cron startup script would probably be the first one I would check. After that you might look for anything that is non-standard (ie. added by an application or manually by someone else). An easy way to look for cron related things would be to do a 'grep -i cron /sbin/init.d/*' and see what comes up.

Another place to look might be /etc/rc.log to see if anything was logged during startup about cron manipulations.

[John Palmer]

Can't think of anything except for some sort of housekeeping script checking for files of a particular name (sucs as core).

What is the user name? It may be significant.

[MANOJ SRIVASTAVA]

Hi Houston


Also check for the .profile of the users since a simple command like crontab -r can remove the crontba for the user already set it . Grep for crontab and check for the options.


Manoj Srivastava

[Houston Kemper]

Hi folks,

All responses have been great and I appreciate your help. I've checked the rc.log and cron starts up without a hitch. The user is called 'pm' for Process Manager for a homegrown application. The only other thing I can think of is that this machine is ServiceGuarded with two other systems. Is it possible that the cluster startup is causing a problem?

Thanks again

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Hi
How much space do you have in /var as I had an occurance where var filled up and root cron was cleared.

Just and idea

Paula

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

Make sure that the user is allowed to run cron tasks.
See /etc/cron.allow
(I believe)

Bill