Hello James,
On Mon, 2 Jul 2018 11:31:07 +0000 James Pearson james-p@moving-picture.com wrote:
wwp wrote:
On Mon, 02 Jul 2018 09:59:17 +0100 Pete Biggs pete@biggs.org.uk wrote:
So, service is running but what could happen that makes /etc/cron.* not being fired?
You don't say, but if this is CentOS 7, then cron.daily/weekly/monthly is run using anacron, not cron.
Oops, yes CentOS 7, sorry.
For the record: # service anacron status Redirecting to /bin/systemctl status anacron.service Unit anacron.service could not be found. You have mail in /var/spool/mail/root
Sure, anacron is not installed. So how could stuff in /etc/cron.{daily,weekly} work until June 02? Probably because it didn't need anacron at all, no? I've looked at yum history, it doesn't talk at all about anacron (but cronie-anacron) so it's not been installed and removed).
anacron is part of the cronie-anacron package
There is no anacron service file ... anacron is run by cron - see below:
Oh-oh, thanks for your lights.
It's configured in /etc/anacrontab and is usually run once a day by the script /etc/cron.hourly/0anacron - cron.hourly is still run by cron. If the script doesn't exist, then anacron won't run and cron.daily etc won't happen.
There's a /etc/cron.d/0hourly here:
# Run the hourly jobs SHELL=/bin/bash PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin MAILTO=root 01 * * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.hourly
I'm still not sure that talking about anacron is relevant here, and I don't know why either if you say it should be anacron in CentOS 7.
grep for anacron in /var/log/cron* for any clues
Hah!
Log excerpts, something that may matter but that I missed at first: anacron[22814]: Job `cron.daily' locked by another anacron - skipping
Don't know exactly what went wrong there, but I killed a few processes and I'll see how it behaves naturally this night, if it still fails I know have enough to observe, understand and fix. I think you helped me understanding few things here and how to fix it, thanks, James and Pete!
Regards,