Ubuntu – Why would anacron not be running

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I have a Ubuntu system that has anacron installed. However I'm pretty sure it's not running. It's not running the commands in /etc/cron.daily to rotate the syslog files (I'm using sysklog, which has its own rotating log method, not using logrotate). The last time the logs were rotated were in October 2009. /var/spool/anacron/cron.daily exists and the contents are 20091015. AFAIR we had a power outage then, and everything rebooted.

How can I debug anacron? How can I see why it's not running? My first instinct is to look for /var/log/anacron, but that's not there. How can I fix it to make it run again?

Best Answer

Look at the following:

zgrep anacron /var/log/cron.log.{9..1}* /var/log/cron.log | less

The last entry on one system for me is November 4, 2008.

zgrep anacron /var/log/syslog.{9..1}* /var/log/syslog | less

The entries range from December 28 through January 4 for me.

cat /etc/crontab

You should see entries similar to this for daily, weekly and monthly:

25 6    * * *   root    test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily )

And this should show a bunch of files:

ls -l /etc/cron.{daily,weekly,monthly}

In /etc/cron.daily I have both logrotate and sysklogd.

And if you do:

ps auxww | grep [c]ron

you should see that the cron daemon is running.

If you do:

cat /etc/cron.daily/sysklogd

you should see a few lines that end in || exit 0 - check to make sure that the files exist and, for the ones with test -x that they are executable. Some of them don't for me since I'm using logrotate.

Check to see if syslogd is running:

ps -C syslogd

See if savelog exists and is executable:

ls -l $(type -p savelog)

That's all I can think of at the moment.

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