Cron dying unexpectedly [Re: stories about actually using FC3t1 on a regular basis?]

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Tue, 10 Aug 2004 09:04:09 -0500, Harry Putnam <reader at newsguy.com> wrote:
> Shows the same message I posted previously:
>   # service crond status
> crond dead but pid file exists
> 
> Any idea how I can debug this?

This is very odd, I have not seen this behavior at all, and I havent
turned off selinux or done anything special to prevent this from
happening.  Every day i've checked to see if cron is running in the
morning on my test box.. and every day its there.  The box is
completely develment updated, started from a fresh workstation
install.

Do you have any idea when it dies? write a cronjob that reports the
status of cron with a timestamp to a log file and see if you can
narrow down when the process dies. An attempt to log every 10 minutes
or so wouldn't be unreasonable, you could narrow down the problem to a
10 minute period of time and see if its consitently the same time.  Or
is this somewhat random?

My gut says its some sort of script thats being activated that ends up
killing cron. Do you have any local cronjobs defined?  You might try
disabling on locally defined cronjobs and see if cron stays up. Then
you might try disabling all cronjobs managed by rpms in
/etc/cron.daily or whatever.  Just let cron sit there running with
nothing to do and see if it crashes.

-jef