Path: utzoo!utgpu!cunews!bnrgate!brtph3!brchh104!brchs1!bnr.ca!rice.edu!sun-spots-request
From: neptune!craig@uunet.uu.net (Craig Donath)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun
Subject: CRON problem after Daylight time change
Keywords: Miscellaneous
Message-ID: <2466@brchh104.bnr.ca>
Date: 17 Apr 91 01:00:00 GMT
Sender: news@brchh104.bnr.ca
Organization: Sun-Spots
Lines: 33
Approved: Sun-Spots@rice.edu
X-Original-Date: 9 Apr 91 21:18:49 GMT
X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 81, message 5
X-Note: Submissions: sun-spots@rice.edu, Admin: sun-spots-request@rice.edu

We are running a small system here with a Sun 4/330 as a server for a half
dozen SPARC1's. Version 4.1.1 of SunOS was installed a month ago. 

This week we noticed that one of our cron jobs has stopped running. It
does not appear to have run since late Saturday sometime. It is a job
intended to load some tables in an INFORMIX database IF the ascii load
files have been sent from another source. The crontab entry is:

    30 0-8,18-23 * * * /usr/local/cron_load.sh

In other words, the script is to run each hour on the half-hour except
during the work day. It has been fine for many months, but on Monday
(April 8) we noticed that none of the files queued on Sunday or Monday had
been picked up.  The job only sends mail if it finds work to do, so we
could only trace it back to Saturday when looking for successful
execution. Cron was running, and in fact, other jobs in the same (root)
crontab were still working OK.

By stopping and restarting cron we were able to correct the problem, but
are curious as to why it occurred. By coincidence, this is the ONLY job
that would have been scheduled between midnight and 5:00 AM Sunday morning
(when the time gained an hour - at 2:00 AM I guess...), and as I mentioned
before, the only one that stopped working. Was the system still waiting
for something to happen at 2:30 AM that it never saw? Did this happen to
anyone else?

The folks at the 800 line gave the usual, "Well, I guess that was probably
it, then..." answer, but that still leaves me feeling kinda hollow. Until
I hear otherwise, I will assume this experience was due to Too Many Years
Of Bad Drugs and write it off as such.

Does anyone really know?
Craig Donath