Re: Trouble-shooting Cron Problems FreeBSD5.4

Dan Nelson writes:
The "operator" user has no access to /etc/crontab. You have probably
copied entries from the system crontab (i.e. /etc/crontab) into a
user's crontab. The system crontab has the extra "user" column, where
user crontabs don't (since they always run as the user).


Thank you. That is exactly what happened. I checked the
working system by doing

crontab -e -u operator

and there was no crontab there at all. I then went to the ailing
system and, voila, there was the copy of /etc/crontab complete
with all its comment lines. I remember being confused at one
stage about /etc/crontab because of the line

\# /etc/crontab - root's crontab for FreeBSD

After all, the root user also has a crontab file with the
normal user fields (minus the special 6TH field).

Somewhere along the way, I probably typed either

crontab -u operator crontab

from /etc or did a crontab -e -u operator and joined /etc/crontab
in to the new table.

Remember the saying that goes, "Nothing can be made
foolproof because fools are so ingenious?" That pretty well says
it all. I am not sure how I figured it might need to go in the
operator account, but that's where it wound up. I am sure that
solves the problem. I'll know in 15 minutes when the next
newsyslog command fires and I don't get the squawk.:-)

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group
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