Vixie-cron email stopped working

Akaihiryuu · l33t Joined: 08 May 2003 Posts: 794 Location: Columbus, OH

In the past couple of weeks, somehow on two of my machines, vixie-cron stopped sending emails properly. I have 3 machines...my server (which runs postfix...cron on this machine continues to email properly), a laptop, and another desktop (both using SSMTP to forward email to the server). The laptop and the desktop are both failing to send mail (it does end up in dead.letter though). I checked my /var/log/messages on both of those machines, and I'm getting the same error on both. I don't have access to the error log right now, but it says something like "SSMTP: connection died during processing". Cron is definitely trying to send the emails...it looks like SSMTP is where the problem is. However, if I mail root@triforce (the address it should be sending to, just using mail from the command line), the mail goes through and is delivered to postfix on my server. This error only comes up when cron tries to send email. This just mysteriously started 2 weeks ago, everything had been working fine for a year prior to that, and I haven't touched any of the config files for a long time. I'll post my /var/log/messages, crontab, and SSMTP configs when I get home, but in the meantime has anyone encountered an issue like this?

madcow3891 · n00b Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 16

Just so you don't feel alone, I am having the same problem. I administrate 12 Gentoo boxes here at work and of the 12, 4 stopped sending me e-mails from my cron jobs.

/etc/crontab MAILTO is set
Trying 'echo "hello!"' as a cronjob that runs once every hour has yielded nothing thus far.
I see cron running the process in my logs, just have no e-mail output.
I've tried restarting both postfix and vixie-cron to no avail.

So far the only successful answer I can find is "install dcron" but as I manage 12 boxes that have to be similar, that would be a PITA.

Anyone- help? I'll post if I find anything...

madcow3891 · n00b Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 16

...

Perhaps I don't have the same issue as you. The restart of vixie-cron actually fixes the problem. I had said in my previous post that I restarted the process, but this simply was not the case. I did it and now cron is e-mailing just fine. I confirmed this on all four boxes. Give that a shot?

Akaihiryuu · l33t Joined: 08 May 2003 Posts: 794 Location: Columbus, OH

That's a thought...but cron is actually attempting to send the email, it's SSMTP that's failing. Plus, one of these machines is a laptop which does not run all the time, thus cron has been restarted many times.

Akaihiryuu · l33t Joined: 08 May 2003 Posts: 794 Location: Columbus, OH

Here's the relevant portion of /var/log/messages:

shmakes · n00b Joined: 22 Mar 2005 Posts: 9

I am still having problems with ssmtp on one of my computers. (Same error as original post.)

A cron job that sends intrusion detection alerts works fine using ssmtp, however, my nightly backup cron job fails using ssmpt every night.

Any further insights?

Thanks
Steve

Darknight · Guru Joined: 26 Jan 2004 Posts: 483 Location: Italy

In my case I checked mail logs in my mail server.
It looked like vixie-cron was sending mail to root@hostname which the mailserver interpreted in root@fully.qualified.hostname and the proceeded to try to send it back to the original machine, failing miserably.
I added an alias for root@fully.qualified.hostname on the mailserver pointing to my root email address and now it's working. The matter is, ssmtp can't handle anything in the form of "user@host", it only understands "user" so the change in config has to be made on the mail server.