I recently had a system drive crash on a Sarge system, so when I put in a new drive, I installed Etch (also figuring that will make upgrading to Lenny easier). Everything seems to have gone well, except for one point: Cron is not behaving well.
After installing my packages and getting everything to the point where I wanted it, I did "/etc/init.d/cron restart" just to make sure cron was running. Then I took my backup crontab file (named ct) for root and did "crontab ct" and checked it with "crontab -l" and everything looked fine. Then I did this for the one user on the system as well and it looked correct. Crontab did not give me any errors at all. After a day or two, I realized my backups (made regularly by cron entries) were not in sync, so I did "ps -ax|grep cron" and /usr/sbin/cron was running. It was 11:58 AM so I added an entry into the root crontab to echo the date and time into a tmp file at noon each day into my ct file, then did "crontab ct" and it installed the ct file. I waited and checked. The test command had run. I then reinstalled the backup ct file for the one user on the system, figuring at this point things should be okay. I didn't use a test command like I did with root -- why would I need to? Also, there's another point: This user has a program that, if cron is running, pulls a list of commands from its database once a day and installs them into its crontab. Its part of a business system with commands it needs to run at regular intervals. This system has been working flawlessly on Sarge for several years. I did check logs and programs were running on time. Then a few days later, I found out cron was not running the programs anymore. I did a "crontab -l" and all the entries needed are there for cron. At this point, even if my program to update cron from the database has problems, there are still commands for cron to run by this user. Just to test things, I did "crontab -l >ct" then "crontab ct" and there was no problem with cron installing those commands again. Yet it doesn't want to run the commands for this user. Crontab has no problem with the commands, but cron won't run them as directed. Any ideas what is going on here? Thanks! Hal -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]