Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 130996
crond crashes intermittently - need debug help
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:48 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040207 Firefox/0.8 Description of problem: Crond seems to crash intermittently. I need some help obtaining debug information to post. Simply starting it with the service command puts me back in business. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1. Start crond 2. Wait for crash ( can't give amount of time 3. Restart it Additional info:
You should really upgrade to FC2 - FC1 has been "retired" . You are running vixie-cron-3.0.1-76 ? vixie-cron-4.1-FC2_3 is the latest recommended version for Fedora. If you can't upgrade, or you upgrade and the crash still occurs, please do the following : $ grep crond /var/log messages | tail -10 > /tmp/cron_crash.log $ tail -10 /var/log/cron >> /tmp/cron_crash.log and attach the resulting cron_crash.log file to this bug - that should give us a way to start determining the problem.
I have already checked messages for goofy errors and am not getting any. Can I enable a debug level in crond somehow? I can't apply that latest RPM because FC1 doesnt have SELINUX support.
Is there any reason not to upgrade to FC2 ? You can see exactly what's happening as follows - as root: $ service crond stop $ ulimit -c unlimited $ cd /var/spool $ crond -nx 'ext,sch,proc,pars,load,misc,test,bit' 2>&1 | tee /tmp/cron_dbg.log (all on one line). This will run crond in the foreground, so you won't get another prompt until it exits. Then wait for the crash - how long does it take? - and then do: $ gzip -9 /tmp/cron_dbg.log and append the resulting /tmp/cron_dbg.log.gz file to this bug . If there is a 'core.*' file in the /var/spool directory, please also compress! the latest! core.* file and append the core.gz to this bug.
This is a UML box so upgrading is pretty much starting over. It hasn't crashed yet since I last started it so That probably won't work. I need to find out how often this is happening.
OK, well if you don't mind a huge /var/log/messages file, do this: 1. Enable core dumps: edit /etc/profile to say: # No core files by default # ulimit -S -c 0 > /dev/null 2>&1 ulimit -c unlimited >/dev/null 2>&1 2. Edit /etc/init.d/crond - where it says "daemon crond" in start(), make it say: daemon crond -x 'ext,sch,proc,pars,load,misc,test,bit'& All the debug info will now appear in /var/log/messages, and if crond cores, the corefile will be in /var/spool. To find out how often it happens, create a cron job: '* * * * * /bin/date>>/tmp/cron.alive.txt' The last date & time string written to /tmp/cron.alive.txt will be the last time cron ran its jobs. This really doesn't happen with current version ! I'll work on getting a update to vixie-cron-4.1 out to Fedora 1 & 2 updates.
Just clearing out old bugs here. This one is definitely no longer a problem.