Problem with cron?

[Ruben Cardenal_3]

Hi there,

I usually receive some ITO messages regarding 'Cron is not working properly' and I'm not sure exactly what is this supposed to be. Any idea?

TIA

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Hi

Try stopping and then restarting cron.


Paula

[Ian Dennison_1]

perform a strings of all the crontabs, look for any obvious corruptions.

cd /var/spool/cron/crontabs
strings *

Share and Enjoy! Ian

[Michael Tully]

cron is the process that schedules all of the tasks from the operating system. It is a background process that starts automatically with the system. It is possible that the process could die. To restart it:

# /usr/sbin/cron && echo cron started

[Ruben Cardenal_3]

Yes, that's the task I use to do and I'd like to know a little more about the origin of that 'problem'... Curiosity?? :) (Like to know why I do every action, that's all)

[Ivan_42]

Maybe,
just a kill -HUP (cron pid) command could be enough.
I.

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Hi
Is cron now working at all or is it just some jobs that it is having problems with?

Paula

[Ruben Cardenal_3]

Paula,

Every time we receive a notification of this kind, the cron process is always running. The normal action we perform is restarting cron (via the init.d script). So, answering to your question, yes, proccess runs, but ITO notifies that alarm.

Regards

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Hi

Look in /var/log/cron and also /var/log/messages and see if there is anything there that may indicate the problem.


Paula

[Ruben Cardenal_3]

Hi again,

There is nothing at /var/adm/messages regarding today nor at /var/adm/cron/log suggesting errors from cron...

[Jean-Louis Phelix]

Hi,

Perhaps you should look in ITO the condition which make this message appear (surely a script), then try to understand why it's sent. Perhaps it's a 'local' script with a bug ...

Regards.

[Ruben Cardenal_3]

Jean-Louis,

This problem comes randomly from any server.(We monitor here hundreds of them)

[Con O'Kelly]

This suggests even more strongly that it is an ITO script or template that is generating the message as does the wording of the message "cron is not working properly".
The message in ITO should tell you the source of the message (highlight the message in the browser & click details). From this you should be able to track the template/script that generates this message and from there look at the conditions that generate the message.

Cheers
Con

[Jean-Louis Phelix]

Ruben,

When I say 'local' I mean developed by your own. This script is after that distributed by ito on all systems. I'm even more convinced that it's related to your problem if it happens on hundreds of servers (cron itself couldn't be as much unreliable ...). Can you post the monitoring script that you use ?

Regards.