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Cron not running

Alistair Mcintyre

On my WHM server, cron appears to not be running. The first warning I received was that WHMCS automation was failing. I have several clients who also have crons, and all sites appear to be affected.

If I run "tail -f /var/log/cron" it shows me recent cron activity, and it's all from around 12 hours ago.

I have tried stopping and restarting crond, and this made no difference. 

When I check crond status, I get the following...

pam_systemd(crond:session): Failed to create session: Connection timed out
Jan 05 17:12:01 host.name.tld crond[2600060]: (username) INFO (Job execution of per-minute job scheduled for 17:10 delayed into subsequen>

Any debug/solutions appreciated.

Alistair.

Comments

5 comments

Date Votes
  • cPRex Jurassic Moderator

    Hey there!  What happens if you manually restart the service on the command line with this command?

    /scripts/restartsrv_crond

    I would expect that to show odd output if there is something happening with the cron service on the machine.

    0
  • Alistair Mcintyre
    • Edited

    Hi there, here is the output...

    Waiting for “crond” to restart ………waiting for “crond” to initialize ………finished.

    Service Status
            crond (/usr/lib/systemd/system/crond.service - simple) is running with PID 2633407 (systemd check method).

    Startup Log
            Jan 05 18:20:07 host.domain.tld systemd[1]: Started Command Scheduler.
            Jan 05 18:20:07 host.domain.tld crond[2633407]: (CRON) STARTUP (1.5.7)
            Jan 05 18:20:07 host.domain.tld crond[2633407]: (CRON) INFO (RANDOM_DELAY will be scaled with factor 43% if used.)
            Jan 05 18:20:07 host.domain.tld crond[2633407]: (CRON) INFO (running with inotify support)
            Jan 05 18:20:07 host.domain.tld crond[2633407]: (antiliespg) ORPHAN (no passwd entry)
            Jan 05 18:20:07 host.domain.tld crond[2633407]: (CRON) INFO (@reboot jobs will be run at computer's startup.)

    crond restarted successfully.

    One other aspect to this i have just noticed. I have some cronjobs that run as root. They do work. This seams to be limited to regular user accounts.

    0
  • cPRex Jurassic Moderator

    Thanks for confirming the service loads properly.  Ultimately I'm not finding much on my end about this specific issue, but checking /var/log/messages is never a bad idea for system-wide problems.

    If that doesn't get you pointed in the right direction you can always create a ticket so the server can be directly investigated.

    0
  • Alistair Mcintyre

    A reboot resolved the issue. (I hate doing them) But it was the last resort. I think PAM was stuck and not able to authenticate to run the cronjobs. Strangely, I got a warning when rebooting...

    "[root@host ~]# reboot Failed to set wall message, ignoring: Connection timed out Call to Reboot failed: Connection timed out [root@host ~]#" It did, however, perform the reboot.

    After the reboot, I was able to tail the cron logs and see entries dated today. I will continue to monitor it.

    Alistair.

    0
  • cPRex Jurassic Moderator

    I'm glad to hear that things are working well now, even if it took a reboot!  At least it ultimately wasn't something related to cPanel.

    0

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