I am running Ubuntu Server 9.04 in VirtualBox on my work PC as a development environment. I have some scripts that I've put in my user's crontab that run throughout the day while I'm SSHed into the VM.

Last night, I closed PuTTy and all of my other running applications (except for VirtualBox and the VM) and went home. I came back this morning to discover that my cron jobs didn't run at all, yet when I SSHed into the VM, the next scheduled job ran. I set the schedule to 5min to test, disconnected again, and the jobs stopped running on schedule.

They seem to only run if I'm logged in to the machine. Obviously, I want them to run on schedule even if I'm not logged in to the VM, otherwise there's no point.

Is there something I've failed to configure correctly?

New Information:

There are now 3 entries in /var/log/cron.log saying the following "Mount of private directory return code [256]"... the entries correspond to when the cron job is supposed to run.

I thought they are supposed to run as my userid? Why would my own userid be unable to run a script in my home directory?