Hey List,
I'm currently running into a problem with one of our machines. It's a file server which runs Fedora core, and part of its nightly job is to run a script that performs a simple incremental backup procedure using rsync. I pipe the output from the rsync call to /dev/null (or else I get huge emails), but I do have the script run "df" after each backup so that I can get a daily report of how much space is left on the backup media, via email.
About two weeks ago I realized that I had suddenly stopped getting these summary emails. On sshing into the machine it appeared that cron had died at some point roughly two or three days prior. I checked the logs but there was no indication that cron was intentionally shut down (typically it inserts a log message when started and stopped). After checking this list, Google, and the bugzilla archives for FC1 I determined that it was probably just a random occurrence. I restarted cron and went on my merry way.
However, I just noticed today that I hadn't received an email from last nights backup. On shelling into the machine, I see that cron is no longer running. I started it up once more, but this is beginning to worry me a bit. I've never had these sorts of problems with cron in the past.
We have another FC1 machine here that runs cron jobs nightly; cron has never (to my knowledge) died on that machine. It certainly runs fewer cron jobs than the fileserver does, though...could that be an issue?
Has anyone experienced strange behavior like this from the vixie-cron packaged with Fedora? Or anyone know of a reason cron might be killed by the OS?
Thanks in advance,
Jeremy
