SUMMARY: Root Cron jobs won't run

Thanks for all the responses. This is an excellent list with a lot of good
people.

Special thanks to Joel Minsky

Here is his response which worked:

Let me guess, you're logging in via ssh and have auditing turned on?

With auditing on there's an additional file
/var/spool/cron/crontab/root.au that crond uses to set the audit flags.
If you run the crontab command when you're logged into the system in a
way that can't be properly audited, like via ssh, the values in root.au
are set wrong and your cron jobs will fail.

Log into the console and run crontab -e, save and all should work.

-Joel


We upgraded from 2.6 to 8 about a month ago.  We never had the problem on
2.6
with modify the cron thru ssh.  At least there is a solution and the cron is
pretty much
static.

Thanks also for replies from:

Blair Rampling
David LaPorte
Wally Wade
Randy Romero
Okan Cimen
David Harrington

and also bergman who also had the correct answer  but incorrectly assumed I
hadn't looked
thru the List archives and Sunsolve and the web, and felt I was "imposing"
yet wasted five minutes
of his time composing a diatribe.

Thanks again to all,
Jim

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Jim Sauer [mailto:jsauer@dticam.dtic.mil]
Sent:	Thursday, August 23, 2001 1:36 PM
To:	Sun Managers (E-mail)
Subject:	Root Cron jobs won't run

My root crontab is not running.  I've stopped and restarted it.
Restarted the system, but things aren't running
I threw in a "df -k | lp" that runs every few minutes to test it, but
it doesn't run.

I'm on an Ultra 1 running Solaris 8.

** Snippet from /var/cron/log **

>  root 716 c Thu Aug 23 13:00:00 2001
! cron audit problem. job failed (/usr/sbin/audit -n) for user root Thu Aug
23 13:00:00 2001
>  CMD: /usr/sbin/audit -n
>  root 717 c Thu Aug 23 13:00:00 2001
! cron audit problem. job failed (df -k | lp) for user root Thu Aug 23
13:00:00 2001
>  CMD: df -k | lp
>  root 718 c Thu Aug 23 13:00:00 2001
<  root 718 c Thu Aug 23 13:00:00 2001 rc=1
<  root 717 c Thu Aug 23 13:00:00 2001 rc=1
<  root 716 c Thu Aug 23 13:00:00 2001 rc=1
! cron audit problem. job failed (df -k | lp) for user root Thu Aug 23
13:05:00 2001
>  CMD: df -k | lp
>  root 719 c Thu Aug 23 13:05:00 2001
<  root 719 c Thu Aug 23 13:05:00 2001 rc=1
! cron audit problem. job failed (df -k | lp) for user root Thu Aug 23
13:10:00 2001
>  CMD: df -k | lp
>  root 720 c Thu Aug 23 13:10:00 2001




** Snippet from root crontab **
(the "df -k | lp" was thrown in just to test it)

### Auditing
00 13 * * * /usr/sbin/audit -n
20 23 * * * /etc/purge.audit.logs
### aset
00 1 * * 6 /usr/aset/aset -l low -u /usr/aset/userlist
#
00,5,10,20,30,40,50,55 * * * * df -k | lp


Anything else I should look for?

Thanks,
Jim