cron process not starting up

S

sinebubble

Registered
cron is not starting on my system. I can start the process manually, but it is not coming up at login. /System/Library/StartupItems/Cron exists and hasn't been modified. I did delete all my Login Items a couple of months back, but I don't recall cron being in there. And when I add it, it does not start. There is nothing in the system logs to indicate why cron is not starting... I'm not too familiar with the start-up process for Darwin. There are no run level start-up script directories. How does one add a start script other than adding it to LoginItems?
 
On my computer, cron gets started by /System/Library/StartupItems/Cron/Cron. Some of the scripts in StartupItems check /etc/hostconfig for whether they should run or not, but the Cron script doesn't, it just runs cron. Login items are for starting processes specific to users, not system-level things like cron. Are you sure that cron isn't running? Do you see anything when you type in:

ps -ax | grep [c]ron

On my computer it seemed that cron wasn't running, but I found out that cron doesn't do anything while my mac is asleep. So my daily, weekly, and monthly scripts which are supposed to run early in the morning never got run. I put together a solution for that which I just posted to macosxhints.com yesterday, so check that out if that is your problem.
 
Resolved by a posting on forums.macnn.com.

http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=001800

Bingo!

From this link, I learned about /sbin/SystemStarter. Running this manually showed me that it was dying when running the Cisco VPN client I installed. I disabled the client software and SystemStarter was able to get to Cron. Excellent! Many thanks for the tip, rkt!


quote:

Originally posted by rkt:

systemstarter runs the system scripts in /System/Library/StartupItems (based on the settings in each item's StartupParameters.plist file) at start time. user installed items are placed in /Library/System/Library/StartupItems, and are run at the same time.

there are more details here:
http://www.darwinfo.org/faq.shtml#startup
 
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