[KLUG Members] RH9 and cron

[Dirk H Bartley]

On Wed, 2005-02-16 at 12:48 -0800, Mark Jeromin wrote:
> > Cron is dieing on me.
> > 
> > [root at srvbai3 root]# /etc/init.d/crond status
> > crond dead but pid file exists
> 
> Did you manually delete the pid file before trying the
> start? I've seen some accounts that /etc/init.d/crond
> is sometimes unreliable.

Nope.  It seems to restart without issue.
> 
> Secondly, do you see the crond as a zombie using ps?

[root at srvbai3 log]# /etc/init.d/crond status
crond dead but pid file exists
[root at srvbai3 log]# ps -ef | grep cron
root     18419 10275  0 08:22 pts/8    00:00:00 grep cron

> 
> > A few revisions ago I solved a cron issue by
> > compiling a more recent cron from an srpm. I'll try
> > that if noone has any other ideas.
> 
> Are you compiling with any optimization flags? -O3 and
> the -O4 will give you unstable binaries.

When I compiled before on a previous version, I let the srpm configure
however it was set to configure.  There does not seem to be a configure
command in that spec file.

> Do you have BSD process accounting turned on in the
> kernel? The pacct logs may help determine the exact
> time crond dies and the sequence of events leading up
> to it.

That is a good question.  I would not know how to find out.

cron seems to be dieing right after using crontab -e to edit the cron
jobs.  As long as I check crons status after editing, cron works fine so
far.

Dirk
> 
> -Mark