I don't expect to find why cron jobs are no longer consistent here, but would like to learn what _might_ cause such unpredictable behavior.
The issue is one I've raised here before: the mail log summary report produced by the shell script 1pdflogsumm. Quick recap: that shell script lives in /etc/cron.daily/ and worked consistently until recently. In root's crontab is the command to run all scripts in /etc/cron.daily at 04:40am. The three main scripts in that directory are 0logwatch, 1pflogsumm, and logrotate. The first and third run every day as they should. The second one became inconsistent. When I stopped getting daily mail log summaries (valued primarily to identify false positive rejections based on overly-broad UCE rules), I added a crontab command to run the script just after midnight each day. For a while I was seeing two summary reports in my mail box: the one generated at 00:02am and the one generated at 04:40am. That held all last week; I kept the early one because I'd rather have 2 reports than none. Saturday through yesterday, neither report ran. Nor would it run if the script was manually invoked. Strange. Today, the early report ran but not the one in /etc/cron.daily. I know enough about system and network administration after a dozen years to keep things up and running most of the time, and to even fix many problems ... particularly after I inadvertently break things. But, I certainly don't have sufficient insight to have any ideas why such inconsistent behavior might occur. It makes no sense to me that two scripts in /etc/cron.daily are run every day, but one no longer does. Nor why an explicit invocation of that script from a separate command in crontab sometimes runs, and sometimes doesn't. The shell script sets up variables then calls /usr/local/bin/pflogsumm, a perl script. I upgraded that script but it makes no difference. While I don't expect to actually be able to solve this weirdness, I would like to understand how it possibly might occur. Your thoughts, ideas, speculation, whatever are encouraged. Rich _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
