[CentOS] cron jobs fail to run

Wed Jan 5 15:29:52 UTC 2011
Mike Burger <mburger at bubbanfriends.org>

> hey centos
>
>  long time no hear! :) I'm having a small issue where the backup jobs
> that I set to run in the crontab of the backup user do not appear to
> be running. Here's how I set it up (with crontab -e as the backup
> user):
>
> run amanda every night (check at 2:45 and backup at 3)
>
> 45 2 * * * /usr/sbin/amcheck  /var/log/amanda/crontab/amcheck.log
> * 3 * * * /usr/sbin/amdump  /var/log/amanda/crontab/amdump.log
>
> The executables are where they are supposed to be and run if you type
> them in on the command line:
>
> [amandabackup at amanda ~]$ ls -l /usr/sbin/amcheck
> -rwsr-x--- 1 root disk 68624 Dec 29 14:08 /usr/sbin/amcheck
>
>
> [amandabackup at amanda ~]$ ls -l /usr/sbin/amdump
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 amandabackup disk 9637 Dec 29 14:08 /usr/sbin/amdump
>
> Although I'm not sure what the 's' indicates in the permissions of
> amcheck.
>
>
> And here's a tail of the cron logs
>
> [root at amanda init.d]# tail /var/log/cron
> Jan  5 07:01:01 newamanda crond[13612]: (root) CMD (run-parts
> /etc/cron.hourly)
> Jan  5 07:17:09 newamanda crontab[13652]: (amandabackup) BEGIN EDIT
> (amandabackup)
> Jan  5 07:18:00 newamanda crontab[13652]: (amandabackup) REPLACE
> (amandabackup)
> Jan  5 07:18:00 newamanda crontab[13652]: (amandabackup) END EDIT
> (amandabackup)
> Jan  5 07:18:01 newamanda crond[1448]: (amandabackup) RELOAD
> (cron/amandabackup)
> Jan  5 07:18:39 newamanda crond[13686]: (CRON) STARTUP (V5.0)
> Jan  5 07:23:01 newamanda crontab[13699]: (amandabackup) BEGIN EDIT
> (amandabackup)
> Jan  5 07:23:47 newamanda crontab[13699]: (amandabackup) END EDIT
> (amandabackup)
> Jan  5 07:25:38 newamanda crontab[13751]: (amandabackup) BEGIN EDIT
> (amandabackup)
> Jan  5 07:25:53 newamanda crontab[13751]: (amandabackup) END EDIT
> (amandabackup)
>
> thanks in advance!

Not using Amanda, myself, it appears to me that the syntax of the commands
in your crontab is incorrect.  Assuming that the last parameter on each
line is a log into which you wish to redirect the output of cron'd
commands, you need to add > or >> (if you wish to append) between the
command and the path to the log file.

Otherwise, cron would be trying to run the amanda commands with the last
item (the log file?) as a command line parameter. As I don't run Amanda, I
don't know whether you're trying to pass those log files as command line
parameters to the amcheck and amdump commands or wish the output of those
commands to be sent to those files.

-- 
Mike Burger
http://www.bubbanfriends.org

Visit the Dog Pound II BBS
telnet://dogpound2.citadel.org or http://dogpound2.citadel.org

To be notified of updates to the web site, visit:

https://www.bubbanfriends.org/mailman/listinfo/site-update

or send a blank email message to:

site-update-subscribe at bubbanfriends.org