[Lvlug] cron woes on slackware

[dann s washko]

dann s washko wrote:
> Ricardo SIGNES wrote:
> ined only by the distros that use them.  WTF!
> 
>>
>> I downloaded the cron (Vixie) source and the security patches from
>> Debian -- http://packages.debian.org/stable/admin/cron -- but it dies
>> horribly on my Slackware box.  Well, not horribly, but worse: silently.
>> strace seems to be complaining about writing to /dev/log, which is not,
>> on Slackware, a logging facility.  At least not on my old Slackware.
>>
>> I can't even find a place to change the logging facility.
>>
>> If anyone has any wisdom about using a better cron daemon on Slackware,
>> I am eager to hear it.
> 
> 
> I took a brief look at this last night, but did not get around to doing 
> any compiling and such.  Slackware 10.x has /dev/log.  I'll keep looking 
> into this, though.
> 

Just looking through the sources vixiecron is using syslogd which, 
according to the man page binds to /dev/log unless specified otherwise. 
  Now on Slackware 10.2 I see /dev/log and syslogd is not called to bind 
to any other port.  Looking through the vixiecron sources I do not see 
any referece to /dev/log and I don't know why it would make a call to 
/dev/log based upon the syslogd on your system if that functionality was 
added into syslogd at a date later than the slackware version you are using.

I got it running on slackware 10.0.  First I had to change the editor in 
the pathnames.h file.  I don't have /usr/bin/editor so I changed editor 
to vi.  I thought there may be issues with the flag -DDEBIAN, but 
removing this in Makefile bonks they build.

The problem I would have, and I think you had the same issue, was that 
cron would execute then quit a second later with no indication as to the 
problem.  My strace log was not too informative and I too saw the 
reference to /dev/log.  I looked at the cron log in /var/log and saw 
that it was complaining about the missing /etc/cron.d directory.  I 
created this directory and all seems well.

I did a test entry in my crontab and it executed as expected.

-- 
Dann S. Washko
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get slack (www.slackware.com) and get happy