Cron Jobs all stopped Aug 12

[siguie]

I don't expect any fixit help here ... it's just very strange and I tried Live Chat and the response was "How wierd" which was very reassuring So I dropped a ticket off and am waiting for a response.

So here's the thing when I checked the Cron thang in CPanel instead of my usual wget's and line command type items each line had a random snipet of code. Very much like taking parts of lines out of a script and putting them where the commands should go.

I tried puzzling out the snipets to see if maybe it was some cunning hack attempt but nope nothing matches and it's all very random.

My guess is that something happened that overwrote my cron.txt file somewhere on the system but for the life of me I have no idea where it is.


Anyways if you are on box314 it might be a good idea to check your crons

[dkinzer]

instead of my usual wget's and line command type items each line had a random snipet of code.

A similar thing happened to me about a month ago. One day, I realized that I wasn't seeing the email from the cron job that does backup. I went to look at the cron job list and it was empty. The seven or so entries that I had there had vanished.

I talked to support and they more or less shrugged their shoulders. They claimed that I should be able to find a file somewhere in the daily backup containing the cron jobs but I had no luck with that. Fortunately, I keep a file on a separate machine with that information so it wasn't terribly painful to get it set up again - just annoying that it was necessary to do so.

[cade]

Siguie,

It sounds like you may have been the victim of writeback corruption. Unfortunately, it happens occasionally with harddrives that never get a break-- there isn't much that you can do to prevent it. You should be able to ask support to restore your crons from backup, though. If they tell you that they can't, just ask that it be escalated to Level 3.

[siguie]

Actually I'm thinking that BH is tweaking the server and the mess up was their attempt at some automated system to rewrite the cron commands. I have something like 15 crons most of which are end of month/year systems but 2 or 3 run each day or every few hours like the TS2 server restarter.

Anywho when I checked them today they were changed ... they work but the path name now included "ramdisk" which I never entered. At any rate somethings happening, don't know what, could just be some tech checking it out as part of my ticket and just decided to fix what I had. I dunno but if you you use crons regularly it's a good idea to back up your commands and check them once in a while

[nitrocrzy]

I lost my crons too a little while back. Unfortunately, I didn't keep a copy so now I need a new backup script. Wanna share yours?

[altidude]

I also lost my cron jobs. I didn't have a backup but I did all my testing using the SSH shell and the commands were still in history. I set these up at least one year ago so I got lucky. I now have a .txt file on my desktop with those commands.

[siguie]

Well it is nice to know that I'm not the only one

Anywho, one update "ramdisk" is apparently replacing "usr" though both are supposed to work ... I don't know why but apparently that's just the way it is.

Oh and no info on what the deal is so backup your crons

[dkinzer]

I didn't keep a copy so now I need a new backup script.

I use Wolf's dbbackup script to backup my databases. I keep a local copy of my site's non-database content (including a copy of my cron jobs) so I don't need to make a backup of that.

[cade]

Siguie,

/Ramdisk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramdisk) isn't replacing /usr per se-- it is merely augmenting it with a bit of speed by removing oft-used applications (i.e. programming language binaries like PHP) from the physical harddisk and leaving in their place a symlink to the mounted ram partition. It means that precious IO load is removed from / and shifted to ram, thus speeding up the entire experience for everyone.

[siguie]

Siguie,

/Ramdisk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramdisk) isn't replacing /usr per se-- it is merely augmenting it with a bit of speed by removing oft-used applications (i.e. programming language binaries like PHP) from the physical harddisk and leaving in their place a symlink to the mounted ram partition. It means that precious IO load is removed from / and shifted to ram, thus speeding up the entire experience for everyone.

Uh I'm not saying anything about a functioning ramdisk I'm just sayining that where one used to use something like "/usr/bin/..." in a command line you are now supposed to use "/ramdisk/bin/..." as in that's what your cron command line may need. According to support "ramdisk" replaces "usr" ... regardless they both work for now.