UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have just found out that a cron i set up to run everyday has not been running. It turns out there was a problem with the box???

How can i get a notification if it does absolutely nothing i.e. an email to say cron not working today??

any help

I'm using KSH Solaris

How are you going to fire off or schedule a check on crond ( the cron daemon) if it is not running? at, batch, and crontab all depend on the crond process being up, happy, and working.

A possibility is to look thru the process list every hour with a permanently running process. This is not a great idea but you could try something like this:

Code:

while true
do
   sleep 3600   # one hour
   ps -ef > /tmp/t.lis
   grep -q 'crond' /tmp/t.lis || echo 'crond is down' | /usr/bin/mailx -s 'crond is down'  me@my.com
done

Then logon and start the script nohup as a background process. But then you have the problem later on: is this process still working? And this script does not tell you if there might be something else going on, like your crontab has syntax errors or the syadmin turned of crontab access for your account.

Sometimes having a proactive sysadmin with the right toolset is the best choice - hacks like this come in a distant second.

I thought it would not really be possible but worth a try.

Thanks Jim

Do you have any system monitoring software running on your server. Example: HP Openview? If yes, then this can be detected and notifications can be sent out.