[Techtalk] cron not running?

[Anne Wainwright]

Hi,

setting my test server up, going well

postfix to send the mail goes fine
mpop to get the mail goes fine from the command line
dovecot to allow others connected to pop their mail also goes fine

I did not use fetchmail because the server is on the command line, and thus no fetchconf (I got cold feet at that stage), getmail not available on apt-get from ubuntu, but mpop was so installed that.

mpop works fine from the command line. As it does not have a daemon, you are supposed to put a line into crontab which I have done. Problem ...

I really don't think that cron is working although I think crond is loaded as can do etc/init.d/cron start/stop/reload  . My line in crontab:

2 *  * * *  root  /usr/bin/mpop -q anotheranne
#

even if the user is anotheranne, nothing happens, and I do have the newline after this last entry as needed.

there is nothing in /etc/cron.hourly which I would have expected as m/c on all day
crontab has lines referencing anacron which is not installed that I can find (well, likely not installed on a server?)

any suggestion as to what may be broken? (i really have spent hours today trying to sort this)

My Debian bible says that cron does not work if not running 24/7 and that is why debian uses anacron, but I don't really understand this and after all I am calling for a 2 minute cycle on mpop so surely it should go?

sysvconfig confirms cron ready to go as far as runlevels go.

thanks
Anne

-- 
so much to do, so little time :(