hmm maybe this is a cron error? It appears my daily cronjobs are no
longer running for some reason.  

okay, this is definately a cron error, my cron jobs are no longer
running!! The last time a cron job ran was on the 14th.  I even tried
restarting crond today to make sure it was running.

What is the problem here ? 
1. man-page problem
'man -k man' will return a list of all man-pages containing 'man'
in the title - this will be all of them. To get more useful results,
specify a more specific string than 'man'.

2. cron problem:
What version of cron are you running ?  (rpm -q vixie-cron) ?
Where are the cron jobs that are not being run:
A) in your /var/spool/cron/${user}  crontab ?
B) in /etc/cron.d/ ?
Please, as root, 'ls -l ' the file containing the cron jobs that 
are not being run. Is it a link ? (vixie-cron will not run jobs
from crontab files that are links). Please append the 'ls -l' output
and the output of 'tail -100 /var/log/cron' to this bug.

Thanks,
Jason Vas Dias. 

 

1) man -k is no longer working for me because the makewhatis cron job
is no longer running (this is the first thing I noticed, and later
discovered it to be a cron issue).  I eventually ran makewhatis by
hand to get the man -k to work.

2) vixie-cron-4.1-19
2A&B) So far I have noticed that the makewhatis and updatedb cron jobs
were not being run, there may be others as well.  I restarted
vixie-cron yesterday afternoon, and this may have fixed some things as
it looks like log-rotate is now working (note: crond was already
running when I did the restart, I made sure that I wasn't doing
something stupid like not having crond running):

# ll /var/log/cron*
-rw-------  1 root root    405 Oct 19 09:01 /var/log/cron
-rw-------  1 root root 186883 Oct 19 04:02 /var/log/cron.1
-rw-------  1 root root 242949 Oct 10 04:02 /var/log/cron.2
-rw-------  1 root root 243357 Oct  3 04:02 /var/log/cron.3
-rw-------  1 root root 242827 Sep 26 04:02 /var/log/cron.4

you will notice that logrotate did not run on the 17th or 18th, but
did run on the 19th.  root's cronjobs did not run yesterday even after
the restart.  I have root cronjobs that run at 6pm PST (must be run at
this time, I can't move those up sooner to test, but I will let you
know if they run tonight).  The contents of /var/log/cron so far just
shows the cron.hourly cron jobs running (but I don't have any hourly
cronjobs so unable to test if these are working).

Aha! I see the problem now - it appears to be a problem with
the kernel and / or glibc - the same vixie-cron-4.1-19 will not 
run ANY system cron jobs under 
kernel-2.6.8-1.624 / glibc-2.3.3-68, but works fine under
kernel-2.6.8-1.603 / glibc-2.3.3-66 .
Am now investigating as top priority and will find a solution today .

Cool, FYI here is what I am running:

kernel-2.6.8-1.624
glibc-2.3.3-68

I am in the process of updating to glibc-2.3.3-70 as I type this.

 The culprit is kernel-2.6.8-1.624, which introduced a bug with 
 opening files in 'O_NONBLOCK' mode; vixie-cron has always opened
 its files with 'O_NONBLOCK' - with the .624 kernel, it "reads" 
 its files, but all the reads fail, so cron thinks it read no data.
 kernel-2.6.9-1.635 is MEANT to be released today ; install that 
 kernel (or go back to kernel-2.6.8-1.603) and you should have no
 problems.

 This is now fixed with kernel-2.6.9-1.637 .