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

[Harry Putnam]

Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta at gmail.com> writes:

> 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?

I am trying something similar right now.  I have a cron job running
that sends mail every 15 min.  So when the mail stops I'll have some
time frame.  But have'nt had it in place long enough yet to tell
anything. 

> 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

Many... But none particularly recent

> 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.

Those are all valid debug steps.  Thanks.  Far as I've noticed it does
seem to be random but then until now I may not have noticed the minute
it when down.  Or even withing hours depending on when.

I'll try tracking thru some of my local cron jobs for a time frame.
Some of them pretty often.
Thanks for the input.