[Techtalk] Troubleshooting cron

Charlotte Oliver charlotte.oliver at rcn.com
Mon Jul 22 12:34:57 EST 2002


On Mon, Jul 22, 2002 at 09:24:58AM -0700, Poppy wrote:
> I need some pointers on where to start troubleshooting cron...
> 
> I set up the following in my crontab for root:
> 59 23 * * sun tripwire --check -S /etc/tripwire/site.key -s -M
> 
> To run obviously tripwire at 11:59 every Sunday night (at least, that's
> what I wanted to set up)
> 
> Happened to notice this morning that I did not have a tripwire report in
> my inbox, and wondering what I should start with in order to find out
> why it didn't run (and obviously fix it so I don't have to remember to
> run a manual tripwire on Monday morning)
> 

I had a big problem with cron when I tried to make the file pretty
by adding in a tab at the beginning of every line.  I went through *everything*
to try and fix it before I realized that that was a no-no.  So let me
be the first to recommend checking that... :)

Also, (at least on Slackware) in /var/log, there's a cron logfile.  
Maybe make sure that cron is set to log in syslogd.conf and then check it again?
I presume you can set syslogd to log crond, but I'm not really sure on that one.
Anyone else know?

Charlotte






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