UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hey all,

I'm running Mandrake 7.2 with several of the development/server tools loaded and operating. One problem I'm having is that I keep getting emails from the "Cron Daemon". They all say:

touch: /var/log/news/nntpsend.log: Permission denied
chmod: same as above
/usr/bin/nntpsend: same as above

Can someone explain what the Cron Daemon is and what it does? I mean, I know what daemon's are, but I can't figure out what this one is used for and how to configure it, if necessary.

I'm also getting another email from the same daemon reporting the following:

DB2 problem...: missing or empty key value specified /usr/bin/news.daily: /var/lib/news/ .news.daily: Permission denied
Reading active file failed, exiting, (see syslog for more info).
Has fetchnews been run?

I'm guessing by that, this has something to do with a news reporting daemon... but anyways, I want to stop the errors. If anyone can help, it would be appreciated. Thanks ahead of time.

Ben

The cron daemon is the daemon which deals with job scheduling in UNIX. Jobs are scheduled via a flat ASCII text file called a crontab. If something goes wrong with a job that has been scheduled with cron then it usually sends a mail to the user concerned - check your crontab file for jobs that are running (crontab -l) edit it if need be (crontab -e).

The jobs that are running will give you better idea of where to goto troubleshoot the actual problem.

If you can't see any jobs scheduled bear in mind that a crontab can exist for any users, so su to a user you suspect would run a job and check their crontab file.

Regards.

Thanks. Currently, this is a box that only I work on, and most of the time I work as root.