[Techtalk] Troubleshooting cron

[Hamster]

This is where it becomes fun.

So you were right in the first place, its a cron prob and not a tripwire prob. But at least we have eliminated the obvious.

Given that youre using mdk, what my tendency to do would be a fight on two fronts thing.

1) Test your entry in crontab by changing the command to something like: touch /root/test.
That way you check the running of the cron job itself and any permission error problems.

2) Follow the mdk pattern of how it gets its cron jobs to run. If you have a look at /etc/crontab, it doesnt actually put the individual jobs in there. It separates out the individual jobs into various subdirs (cron.daily cron.weekly etc) and uses run-parts to actually call the individual jobs. 

What you might want to do is make a two line shell script
----
#!/bin/bash
tripwire --check etc
-------
and save it in the cron.daily folder. 

That way you are following a pattern of cronjob execution that you know works. You can make your new script have exactly the same permissions etc as the existing scripts in that dir.


I know what I've just recommended will be viewed as heresay by the purists, cause its not the "done" way, but sometimes its just best to do as the distro does.

I'm thinking there shouldnt be a problem with cron itself, otherwise youd be getting a host of other cron related errors if that was the case. (ie with logrotate and makewhatis)

Hamster