Problem with cron

[Richard Davies_6]

cron on one of the hpux 10.20 servers I look after has decided to stop sending emails to the root account. I reboot the server last night to see if that would sort out the problem, but no such luck. Any suggestions?

Thanks

Richard

[Mark Grant]

Firstly, check what is happening in /var/adm/cron/log. Also, check that cron is actually running. Let us know what you find.

[Stefan Farrelly]

emails not going to root account sounds like a syslogd problem. Try restarting syslogd (/sbin/init.d/syslog stop then start).

If this doesnt fix it is sendmail running ?
ps -aef|grep -i sendmail

[Richard Davies_6]

Part of the contents of /var/adm/cron/log

hpehq1>more log
! *** cron started *** pid = 2709 Thu Oct 16 20:18:03 BST 2003
> CMD: /usr/lbin/sa/sa1
> root 4907 c Thu Oct 16 21:00:00 BST 2003
< root 4907 c Thu Oct 16 21:00:00 BST 2003
> CMD: /usr/local/bin/backup_openmail
> root 7027 c Thu Oct 16 22:00:00 BST 2003
> CMD: /var/trend/smom12/install_ptn
> root 7028 c Thu Oct 16 22:00:00 BST 2003

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

Another reason could be a mail problem, for instance a changed mode of the /var/mail directory. Check you syslog.log and mail.log file for sendmail logging for relevant info.

And of course: .forward and aliases could result in mail sent to a wrong account, resulting in you missing the mail.

[Keith Bevan_1]

Richard,

For 'belt and braces' you could also force the cron to refresh its lookup of the crontab file by doing a crontab -e and the quitting without making any amendments.

Keith

[Richard Davies_6]

syslogd is running as is sendmail. In fact the server is an email server, so I would know quick enough from users if sendmail was not running.

[Mark Grant]

Richard,

Do you mean your cron job is sending mails or that the cron job is producing output that cron mail (becuase that it's default behaviour).

In either case, it would be worth running the job from the command line to see what happens.

[Richard Davies_6]

Mark

cron is not emailing the output from the cron job. It has worked fine for over 3 years I have been looking after this server, and stopped over last weekend.

[Mark Grant]

I assume that you are sure that the job is still produciong some output.

I would log in as the user this job runs as within cron and send an e-mail using the "mail" command to root and see if that succeeds.

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

Are you sure the job finishes? Because the mail is not send before the cronjob finishes.

To test if the problem is job or server/cron/sendmail related, you could add a job to your crontab that surely sends output, for instance an echo.

[Camel_1]

Did you redirect the cron job to any log files or /dev/null?

[Stuart Urquhart]

Short of space on /var ? Check mailq to see if mail is being queued not delivered. What does it say in /var/adm/syslog/mail.log ?

Does /usr/lib/sendmail -v root < /dev/null work OK ?