fcron stops working

ssummer · n00b Joined: 09 Nov 2005 Posts: 3

I've had fcron installed for a number of months and everything was working fine. However, recently, it runs for a number of hours but then stops running any jobs (normally in the early hours of the morning, but at different times). The fcron process is still running but it just stops running the cron jobs. If I edit crontab file (crontab -e) and save it, fcron starts working again. The log files don't seem to show anything untoward and there are no stuck cronjobs left running or anything like that. It seems to happen much more frequently (daily) since the daylight saving time change - after which fcron started running things twice, so I restarted it.
I'm using version 2.0.2 on x86 platform (ie latest stable version in portage) and I don't recall it having been updated for some time.

Anyone else having these problems or know why it's happening?

Steve

swanson · Posted: Thu Nov 10, 2005 3:34 am Post subject:

Is one of your cron jobs perhaps running ntpdate or similar which could be setting the clock (rather than skewing it like a NTP daemon)?

I had a similar problem with fcron when running date manually to correct the time by fifteen minutes backwards. Never got round to investigating the code but correcting the time forwards shouldn't cause the problem.
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Alan.

ssummer · n00b Joined: 09 Nov 2005 Posts: 3

mryoung_fr · n00b Joined: 17 Jul 2004 Posts: 43 Location: Reims, France

hi,

actually, i have the exact same problem here.

fcron stops doing what it should be ... and there's no reason why.

I didn't think about the ntp thingy, but it's true that i was using ntpd, and now i swapped to openntpd.
Maybe, it can be the issue.

have you find anything else about it ?
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.: mRyOuNg :.

ssummer · n00b Joined: 09 Nov 2005 Posts: 3

bunder · Bodhisattva Joined: 10 Apr 2004 Posts: 5937

did you try restarting it from /etc/init.d ?

anything funny in /var/log/cron.log ?
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mryoung_fr · n00b Joined: 17 Jul 2004 Posts: 43 Location: Reims, France

restarting it from /etc/init.d/fcron corrects the problem too ... means, waking up the daemon, reactivate it...
but, nothing from cron.log. It just stops doing what it should ...
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.: mRyOuNg :.

bunder · Bodhisattva Joined: 10 Apr 2004 Posts: 5937

what kind of jobs are you running? could a job be possibly stuck?
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mryoung_fr · n00b Joined: 17 Jul 2004 Posts: 43 Location: Reims, France

for the moment, i don't have any addons jobs ... only the default crontab (gentoo run-crons) ... so, nothing unusual
about a stuck job, even if it happens sometimes, fcron tells the job is already running, so it can't execute the job, but in this case, it says something. In my case, it stops doing anything ...
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.: mRyOuNg :.

edoceo · n00b Joined: 29 Nov 2005 Posts: 2 Location: Seattle, WA

I saw these posts about fcron stopping, watched them for a while hoping someone would have an answer.
fcron is my favourite choice so I didn't want to switch to dcron or vixie (emotional, not logical reasons).

Anyhow I noticed that fcron started choking up after the clock was skewed more than -1s in a short amount of time.

I have a machine with a horribily bad clock that keeps jumping forward, by more than half a second some times.
I had one opportunity to catch this fluke and saw the logs right before fcron stopped.

15:21:11 ntpd adjusts the clock by -0.8s
15:23:22 fcron runs a job that fires every 3 minutes.
15:26:22 fcron runs that job again
15:26:35 ntpd adjusts the clock by -0.8
15:29:20 about one minute later ntpd adjusts the clock by -0.6
It's two seconds before fcron was going to fire the job, no more fcron entries after 16:29:20
Similar story in another log file.

So look at that, heavy (IMHO) adjustment in short time, right before a job seems to put fcron in an unknown state.

Perhaps interested parties can send the syslog output from their fcrons and ntpds into a single file to check, I just started.

I'm in profile 2005.1 using
sys-process/fcron-2.0.2
net-misc/openntpd-3.7_p1 (-selinux) +ssl[/quote]

WhyteWolf · Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2005 3:08 am Post subject:

after reading the above post I decided to look into fcron a bit more.

apartently this might be do to fcron being an older version ... I have upgraded my fcron to version 3.0.0 which was just released and comes with alot more features.

I havn't had issues since upgradeing it has only been a day tho ... will post again after xmas if things work still

Edit: 3 day later and it's still working ..
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Thomas Phipps
Linux User #180408 LFS User #1791

WhyteWolf

it's still working fine after the upgrade to 3.0.0
would defintly say this is something that was fixed upstream long ago
gentoo just needs to finaly let it's ebuild out of ~
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Thomas Phipps
Linux User #180408 LFS User #1791

xayk · Posted: Wed Jan 18, 2006 12:28 am Post subject:

try: fcrontab -z