Broken crontab/anacron

[Jeff Vian]

On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 16:34 -0500, James Pifer wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 16:09, Jeff Vian wrote:
> > On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 13:23 -0500, James Pifer wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > Have you checked /var/log/cron ?  There should be a RELOAD event logged
> > > > within 1 minute after any change to /etc/crontab .
> > > > 
> > > > --
> > > > Bob Nichols         rnichols42 at comcast.net
> > > 
> > > Ah, I did not see that log file before. Maybe this will help my
> > > situation:
> > > 
> > > Jan 25 11:44:29 mythtv crond[25864]: (CRON) STARTUP (V5.0)
> > > Jan 25 11:44:29 mythtv crond[25864]: (*system*) BAD FILE MODE
> > > (/etc/crontab)
> > > 
> > That seems related to the permissions of /etc/crontab.
> > 
> > By default it is 
> > [jeff at goliath ~]$ ls -l /etc/crontab
> > -rw-r--r--  1 root root 255 Sep 20 16:58 /etc/crontab
> 
> 
> Yep, that's what I have. 
> 
> [root at mythtv etc]# pwd
> /etc
> [root at mythtv etc]# ls -l crontab
> -rw-r--r--  1 root root 323 Jan 25 16:32 crontab
> [root at mythtv etc]# 
> 
> I updated crontab slightly and restarted crond (just being impatient). I
> get nothing in the log at all now. 
> 
> James
> 
At this point it might be best to reinstall crond. I have 3 packages for
cron but only 2 are related to crond. the other is anacron and is not an
issue at this time.

[jeff at goliath ~]$ rpm -qa | grep cron
anacron-2.3-32
crontabs-1.10-7
vixie-cron-4.1-20_FC3

You might try both crontabs and vixie-cron.
There are some things that have dependencies on cron and crontabs so be
careful there.