# Warning to vixie-cron users...

## eccerr0r

Today I tried emerge --update @world after about almost 3 weeks. 

It came out CLEAN, no updates.  That can't be right, have the Gentoo dev team been slacking?

No!  I then noticed I had not gotten an emerge --sync for over two weeks, despite having a cron job to do this every other day.

I recently pulled an update and something got updated, might be glibc or pam along with gcc.  Anyway, vixie-cron had been running fine in the background or at least I thought it was as the process was still running.  Turns out that it was trying to run but coughing up errors when it couldn't dynamically link modules to pam.

A simple restart of vixie-cron was sufficient to restore operation.

Just a word of warning to anyone depending on cron syncs... restart your daemons and ensure they're still running after any update, and sometimes rebooting is not a bad idea (no wonder M$ wants a reboot!)

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## Ant P.

Ah, thanks for the reminder why I run all my systems USE=-pam ;)

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## joanandk

 *eccerr0r wrote:*   

> No!  I then noticed I had not gotten an emerge --sync for over two weeks, despite having a cron job to do this every other day.
> 
> ...
> 
> A simple restart of vixie-cron was sufficient to restore operation.

 

I have seen that too, but in my case there was an entry in the syslog. I have seen that such issues are very seldom and there are ways to check (for example, for each sync done by cron, I get an E-Mail).

Did you change your profile prior to updating cron? If so, this was the cause for the failure.

 *eccerr0r wrote:*   

> and sometimes rebooting is not a bad idea (no wonder M$ wants a reboot!)

 

On MS Windows you reboot even for no reason  :Wink:  I think MS would even like to reboot after you have saved your Word document (just to sure that the cache has been committed)   :Laughing: 

BR

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## eccerr0r

For me it was an unexpected failure, I didn't change the profile - normally it wouldn't fail like this.  The link error was in syslog but was quite cryptic...

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## cboldt

FWIW, I run "lib_users" after doing updates, and restart services to get that report cleaned up.  Not sure it would have caught the mismatch you describe, but I think it would have.

I try to reboot rarely, just out of principle, no practical reason, but did reboot after profile change and emerge -e @world, just to make sure it would (reboot).

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## krinn

Just to prove my memory is gold, here's Naib code that would had saved you...

Thanks goes to Naib so (but i'm not against a little pic of you praising my memory!)

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## eccerr0r

Actually I don't think it would help in this case, because it's a link on demand - the problem library isn't actually loaded in memory until needed, and at that point the failure is detected.

Granted that searching for programs that require restarts that way is helpful (it may have hinted that vixie-cron may have other programs that other libraries indeed does need a restart), most programs don't need immediate restarts because these libraries are saved in memory even if you delete the binaries -- which is why people get the false impression a restart isn't necessary after updates.

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## Zucca

I use metalog to send alerts if it sees something fishy. Simplest thing could probably be to just to run beep (PC-speaker), but to reach further a mail should be sent for example.

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## Hu

I hit this failure recently on a system that had received a sys-libs/glibc update, but no recent PAM updates.  Therefore, I think it was the libc upgrade which provoked the problem, so anything that flagged programs running an old libc (which unfortunately is almost all of them) probably would have reported the need for intervention just on the basis that a deleted libc was in use, independent of whether that broke PAM.

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## Anon-E-moose

I always bounce the box after a libc update.

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