From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041012 Firefox/0.10.1 Description of problem: man -k always returns nothing appropriate Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): man-1.5m2-9 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. man -k man Actual Results: man: nothing appropriate Expected Results: finds man pages apropos. Additional info:
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 .