cron goes mad?

Stephen Walton stephen.walton at csun.edu
Wed Jan 14 05:00:57 UTC 2004


Has anyone else seen output from 'ps -faxwl' like this:

1     0  6366     1  16   0  2236  536 schedu S    ?          0:00 crond
1     0 16115  6366  16   0  5456 1256 do_for D    ?          0:00  \_ CROND
5     0 16116 16115  16   0  5456 1256 coredu D    ?          0:00  |   \_ CROND
1     0 16119  6366  17   0  5456 1256 do_for D    ?          0:00  \_ CROND
5     0 16120 16119  17   0  5456 1256 coredu D    ?          0:00  |   \_ CROND
1     0 16123  6366  17   0  5456 1256 do_for D    ?          0:00  \_ CROND
5     0 16124 16123  17   0  5456 1256 coredu D    ?          0:00  |   \_ CROND


I've deleted several additional lines.  The load average on this system 
is 30 as I write this.  Notice that the second of each pair of jobs 
seems to be in the process of doing a core dump, which is why they are 
unkillable.

When I first saw these on a server, I thought some hacker had broken in 
and built a pretty high firewall with Firewall Builder (highly 
recommended, btw).  But now I see it on a workstation, and so it looks 
like a cron bug.  The workstation from which the above comes has no user 
crontabs, just the stuff in /etc/cron.* which goes in from a standard 
Fedora "Developer's Workstation" install.






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