the daemon that won't die

[Christian Walther]

Hi Colin,

On 02/03/2008, Colin Brace <cb at lim.nl> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
>  I made the mistake of trying to run greyscanner
>  <http://www.ualberta.ca/~beck/nycbug06/scripts/greyscanner> as a
>  regular user. Now, everytime it runs (every 30 minutes), there is a
>  cron error from user "operator" complaining that "you need to be root"
>  to run /usr/libexec/save-entropy. Moreover, each time this happens, an
>  instance of greyscanner, belonging to user operator, remains dormant
>  in memory, which means an additional instance of perl. After a day or
>  so most of my swap memory is used. up.
>
>  I have tried killing every PID associated with user operator and/or
>  greyscanner, but like Lazarus the thing keeps rising from the dead
>  every 30 mins. I can't figure out what process is keeping it alive.

If you get an error from *cron* it means that greyscanner is executed
from cron itself. As root, you might want to an

# crontab -l u operator

to find out if this is true. The format of the crontab-file is explained in

# man -S 5 crontab

See

# man -S 1 crontab

for how to edit or remove a crontab file.


HTH
Christian
[...]