# vixie-cron suddenly ran all nightly jobs at noon?

## tld

Wow...my mythtv backend did a seriously screwed up thing today.  I have it set to run daily cron jobs at 3 AM.  One of those queues MythTV commercial flagging.  I also have some entries that do the same type of queuing in the morning:

```
# for vixie cron

#

# $Header: /var/cvsroot/gentoo-x86/sys-process/vixie-cron/files/crontab-3.0.1-r4,v 1.1 2005/03/04 23:59:48 ciaranm Exp $

#

#

# Global variables

SHELL=/bin/bash

PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

MAILTO=root

HOME=/

# check scripts in cron.hourly, cron.daily, cron.weekly and cron.monthly

0  *  * * *   root   rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.hourly

1  3  * * *   root   rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.daily

15 4  * * 6   root   rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.weekly

30 5  1 * *   root   rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.monthly

*/10  *  * * *   root   test -x /usr/sbin/run-crons && /usr/sbin/run-crons 

# Toms custom morning commflagging

0  5  * * *   root   /etc/cron.daily/myth_3_commcron

0  7  * * *   root   /etc/cron.daily/myth_3_commcron

0  9  * * *   root   /etc/cron.daily/myth_3_commcron 2

0  11  * * *   root   /etc/cron.daily/myth_3_commcron 2

```

This has all been working for many many years.  Today at around noon I was having a hard time ssh'ing to that machine.  once I got in I discovered that apparently, all those cron jobs fired off at just after noon, causing all sorts of hell.

It appears that the daily jobs, except my commflag queuing script did in fact run at 3AM as they're supposed to.  However they all re-ran at noon, and then again at about 12:10...WTF?

After that I restarted vixie-cron in case it was somehow whacked out.

What on EARTH could cause that?  This is generally a VERY stable system.  I've also not updated it recently.

Crazy.

Tom

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## tld

Here's something odd I just noticed in my message logs.

```

 cat messages.0

Feb 23 03:10:05 mythback syslogd 1.5.0: restart.

Feb 23 03:10:46 mythback syslogd 1.5.0: restart.

Feb 24 03:10:40 mythback syslogd 1.5.0: restart.

Feb 25 03:10:40 mythback syslogd 1.5.0: restart.

Feb 26 03:10:44 mythback syslogd 1.5.0: restart.

Feb 27 03:10:43 mythback syslogd 1.5.0: restart.

Feb 28 03:10:41 mythback syslogd 1.5.0: restart.

Mar  1 03:10:46 mythback syslogd 1.5.0: restart.

cat messages.1

Mar  1 04:20:02 mythback syslogd 1.5.0: restart.

Mar  2 02:28:19 mythback kernel: tda9887 2-0043: i2c i/o error: rc == -6 (should be 4)

Mar  2 02:28:19 mythback kernel: klogd 1.5.0, ---------- state change ---------- 

Mar  2 02:28:19 mythback kernel: Loaded 23615 symbols from 20 modules.

Mar  2 02:28:19 mythback kernel: tda9887 2-0043: i2c i/o error: rc == -6 (should be 4)

Mar  2 02:28:49 mythback last message repeated 59 times

Mar  2 03:10:45 mythback syslogd 1.5.0: restart.

cat messages

Mar  4 12:01:21 mythback syslogd 1.5.0: restart.

Mar  4 12:01:32 mythback syslogd 1.5.0: restart.

Mar  4 12:10:47 mythback syslogd 1.5.0: restart.

```

I'm not sure if those errors are related.  That may be something related to my tuner cards.  I don't see any sign of the usual syslogd restart I get from logrotate during the night of the 3rd or lat night at all...nothing until my debacle today at noon.  I'm also very confused about those archive numbers.  I thought the higher numbers were usually the older logs but in this case message.1 and message.0 appear to be reversed.

Tom

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## cwr

It sounds as if  either the clock went out to lunch, or /var/spool/cron/lastrun/* got corrupted.

It might be worth running fsck on the partition holding /var

Will

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