cron dies (randomly?) on fedora core 1

[Jeremy Brown]

Hey List,

I'm currently running into a problem with one of our machines.  It's a 
file server which runs Fedora core, and part of its nightly job is to 
run a script that performs a simple incremental backup procedure using 
rsync.  I pipe the output from the rsync call to /dev/null (or else I 
get huge emails), but I do have the script run "df" after each backup so 
that I can get a daily report of how much space is left on the backup 
media, via email.

About two weeks ago I realized that I had suddenly stopped getting these 
summary emails.  On sshing into the machine it appeared that cron had 
died at some point roughly two or three days prior.  I checked the logs 
but there was no indication that cron was intentionally shut down 
(typically it inserts a log message when started and stopped).  After 
checking this list, Google, and the bugzilla archives for FC1 I 
determined that it was probably just a random occurrence.  I restarted 
cron and went on my merry way.

However, I just noticed today that I hadn't received an email from last 
nights backup.  On shelling into the machine, I see that cron is no 
longer running.  I started it up once more, but this is beginning to 
worry me a bit.  I've never had these sorts of problems with cron in the 
past.

We have another FC1 machine here that runs cron jobs nightly; cron has 
never (to my knowledge) died on that machine.  It certainly runs fewer 
cron jobs than the fileserver does, though...could that be an issue?

Has anyone experienced strange behavior like this from the vixie-cron 
packaged with Fedora?  Or anyone know of a reason cron might be killed 
by the OS?

Thanks in advance,

Jeremy