Re: [Dump-users] dump & cron - what's up?

[Eric J. <eje...@sw...>]

Hi,

The fact that you're getting no output at all (not even an error
message) indicates that perhaps the cron job isn't even running at all,
i.e. that the system doesn't think it is time for the job yet.  Are you
sure you have let the correct time pass?  Do you have other cron jobs
that run successfully?

> The same thing through crontab doesn't work
> 0 3 * * 4 dump -4uf /mnt/dump/dump.var.4 /var

Based on my reading of the crontab man page, this will run at 3 AM every
Wednesday morning.  Is that when you were testing this out?  Or did you
use a different crontab entry?

Double-check the date and time on your machine, then set the crontab
entry to some time in the very near future (perhaps putting "*" in the
fifth field for day of the week).  Then try again and if it fails, sends
the output of the 'date' command (showing your machine's day and time),
the output of 'crontab -l', the time you *finished* editing the crontab,
and how long you waited.

I'd also suggest putting the explicit path to the dump binary into the
crontab entry as mentioned in the previous message.

Good luck,

Eric

P.S.  One more thing.  I just noticed in your original message:

> /var/log/cron
> Apr 15 10:47:00 NV CROND[23149]: (root) CMD (dump -4uf /mnt/dump/dump.var.4 /var)

that this is running as root.  Have you checked root's e-mail (or the
e-mail of whatever account receives root's messages) to see if there is
a message there?  You might also try setting MAILTO=gazolini (or
whatever your username is) in the crontab to get the cron mail output.