Once again the list comes through. While I still wait for a sensible answer
from the section of Sun to which my company pays a lot of money, I get
pointed in the right direction from this list.
My problem was that cron would not run jobs. I had killed cron and
restarted it and within an hour it was dead again. My local Sun support
referred me to a known bug-id for cron in 4.1.3 which was obviously NOT what
I was encountering, and also asked me for an assesment of the impact of
this problem on my environment - well, none really - I mean, who needs that
cron stuff anyway :-) !
Anyway, as a number of people were able to tell me, cron was not dead but
sleeping - cron has a maximum number of jobs that it will simultaneously
run - this can be configured via/var/spool/cron/queuedefs but apparently a
figure of 25 for the maximum number of processes is compiled into the code.
Mind you, I still don't know why my cron was hitting this limit. Nothing
has been changed in any crontabs here recently, and the problem went away
after a reboot - I really hate Unix problems that will only go away on a
reboot - it's bad enough having to reboot PCs all the time.
Thank to all the following
mshon@sunrock.East.Sun.COM (Michael J. Shon {*Prof Services} Sun Rochester)
D.Mitchell@dcs.shef.ac.uk (Dave Mitchell - Sheffield University)
guy@netapp.com (Guy Harris)
sdr@rdga3.att.com (S. D. Raffensberger 500622500 (RD))
perryh@pluto.rain.com (Perry Hutchison)
raoul@MIT.EDU
casper@Holland.Sun.COM (Casper Dik)/var/spool/cron/queuedefs
barmar@bbnplanet.com (Barry Margolin - BBN Planet Corporation)
kannan@catarina.usc.edu
greevy_o@vptt.ch (Orla Greevy PTT Switzerland)
and honourable mention goes to Michael Shon, who gave me the kind of
answers and response for which we're paying Sun a lot of money - send Sun
Germany an internal recharge, Michael !
Kindest regards,
Niall O Broin
European Space Operations Centre nobroin@esoc.esa.de
Darmstadt Ph. +49 6151 903619
Germany Fax. +49 6151 902420
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