cron stops silently

[Dean Strik]

Phil Brennan wrote:
> Since updating our server to 5.4-STABLE, I've noticed a very strange
> problem with cron.
> Sometimes it just decides to stop, for no apparent reason. It stops at
> different times, it doesn't seem to be affected by any particular
> cronjob.
> There are no messages about this in any logfile, it just stops running
> and I have to start it manually. Obviously this is a major PITA. Can
> anyone help me to debug this problem further? I really don't know
> where to look. Searches of all freebsd mailing lists have turned up
> with nothing.

I just filed PR 81555 about this. For me, it appears that cron(8) exits
after a SIGPIPE when an LDAP-user does a crontab -e. Are you also using
LDAP here? See also the PR (hasn't appeared on the website when I type
this btw).

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=81555

-- 
Dean C. Strik             Eindhoven University of Technology
dean at stack.nl  |  dean at ipnet6.org  |  http://www.ipnet6.org/
"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." -- Wolfgang Pauli