AMD 10.0 - cron & atrun

[Trond Endrestøl]

On Wed, 2 Jul 2014 23:25-0700, Jim Pazarena wrote:

> I've recently installed FBSD 10.0 AMD on an HP rack server.
> A "ps" shows 574 cron instances running, and 573 atrun instances running.
> But no actual jobs other than 5 or 6 running.
> I 'think' the cron is open because it has triggered atrun.
> But I cannot for the life of me figure out why atrun isn't terminating.
> I tried an "atrun" at the command line, and it sits there, as "if" it
> was running something.
> 
> Advice much appreciated.

Have you added anything particular to /etc/crontab?
How about any crontab(1) files stored in /var/cron/tabs?
Any files in /var/at/jobs or /var/at/spool?

atrun(8) should only be invoked by cron(8).
at(1) is the user interface to the atrun service.

Unless you or your users need the atrun service, you could simply add 
the # character at the beginning of the atrun line in /etc/crontab. 

There's no need to restart cron(8) after editing /etc/crontab, on the 
next minute cron(8) will notice the change in timestamps and re-read 
/etc/crontab.

Now, in your case I would first try and understand why you have so 
many cron processes running,

ps -adux

would be helpful, and next kill them all using

killall -TERM cron

, and if failing that, kill them using

killall -KILL cron

Delete any files in /var/at/jobs and in /var/at/spool.

Finally, if you're convinced your /etc/crontab and any files in 
/var/cron/tabs are sound, then start cron again using

/etc/rc.d/cron start

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