Cron silently dies. Why?

Cron silently dies. Why?

Post by Youri N. Podchos » Sat, 29 Apr 1995 04:00:00



Did anybody encounter the following problem before:

Occasionally, at random times cron daemon bombs out without
any visible reason: no resource bottlenecks registered, no
messages in /usr/adm logs, nothing special incron's own log,
very simple set of crontabs.  I don't see any dependencies
between this cron's deaths and what is going on in the system
at the time it happens.

I understand that there might be a zillion of reasons for
that, but I just hope that somebody might face things like
that before, or maybe this is some "well-known" problem
under some special circumstances.

Any clue or advice is appreciated, 'cause I just have never
seen anything similar before, and even don't have a slightest
idea about where to start investigation.

SCO UNIX 3.2.v4.2 (with a number of third-party products
installed) is running on Compaq Prosignia VS.

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Youri N. Podchosov (ynp)  ***  Davidsohn & Son, Inc. NYC  ***  718-234-4140 |

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

 
 
 

1. Why does my /etc/cron die?

I have a RS/6000-950 with AIX 3.1.5.   I am running hourly news processing
jobs (plus every 3 hours, and at 1:00 AM) under a normal account, besides the
standard root jobs.  Recently we ran out of /tmp space, and I found masses
of jobs named "croutUNIQUESTUFF" (you get the idea), many with 0 length
(OK, the job didn't produce output), some non-zero (gee, I haven't gotten
many cron mail messages recently, have I?).

I looked at /usr/adm/cron/log and saw this:

! *** cron started ***   pid = 28790 Thu Sep 12 03:00:08 1991
! *** cron started ***   pid = 77122 Thu Sep 12 03:07:48 1991
! *** cron started ***   pid = 33047 Thu Sep 12 05:00:22 1991
! *** cron started ***   pid = 36754 Thu Sep 12 06:00:12 1991
! *** cron started ***   pid = 30289 Thu Sep 12 07:00:10 1991
! *** cron started ***   pid = 30422 Thu Sep 12 08:04:20 1991
! *** cron started ***   pid = 30208 Thu Sep 12 09:00:03 1991
! *** cron started ***   pid = 12037 Thu Sep 12 10:00:02 1991

Showing cron seems to die and get restarted on almost every job!  That
explains the /tmp files not getting mailed and deleted, but why is cron dying?
Any ideas where to look?

By the way, a nearly identical setup running on a 320 for several months has
no problems at all!  cron stays up as long as the system.  The 950 has a
newer version of cnews, but no, it can't...

Thanks for any advice,
Steve

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Roseman
Lehigh University Computing Center

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