What is wrong with those crontabs?

Posted by Guillaume Boudreau on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Guillaume Boudreau
Published on 2012-11-23T00:15:50Z Indexed on 2012/11/24 23:06 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 227

Filed under:

cron

I want my projectors to Power On before the mall opens, and Power Off when the mall closes. So I created crontab entries (that I placed in /etc/cron.d/mall), but today (Thu Nov 22 18:58:29 EST 2012 is the current date on that server), the power-off.sh script got executed at 17:20 (see syslog excerpt below).

Being Thu, Nov. 22, I would have expected the power-off.sh script to be executed at 21:20, per the 4th crontab line below.

Why did power-off.sh execute at 17:20? What is wrong with my crontab entries?

Content of /etc/cron.d/mall:

40  9 22-30 Nov Mon-Sat myuser /usr/local/projectors/power-on.sh
40 10 22-30 Nov Sun     myuser /usr/local/projectors/power-on.sh

20 18 22-30 Nov Mon-Wed myuser /usr/local/projectors/power-off.sh
20 21 22-30 Nov Thu-Fri myuser /usr/local/projectors/power-off.sh
20 17 22-30 Nov Sat-Sun myuser /usr/local/projectors/power-off.sh

40  9  1-22 Dec Mon-Sat myuser /usr/local/projectors/power-on.sh
40 10  1-22 Dec Sun     myuser /usr/local/projectors/power-on.sh

20 21  1-22 Dec Mon-Fri myuser /usr/local/projectors/power-off.sh
20 17  1-22 Dec Sat-Sun myuser /usr/local/projectors/power-off.sh

syslog excerpt:

$ grep power-off.sh /var/log/syslog
Nov 22 17:20:01 lanner-ubu-c2d CRON[23007]: (myuser) CMD (/usr/local/projectors/power-off.sh)

Related posts about cron

any clue in these logs why keyboard audio and internet are messed up

as seen on Ask Ubuntu - Search for 'Ask Ubuntu'
Jun 7 00:01:18 Isis lightdm: pam_unix(lightdm-autologin:session): session opened for user mimi by (uid=0) Jun 7 00:01:18 Isis lightdm: pam_ck_connector(lightdm-autologin:session): nox11 mode, ignoring PAM_TTY :0 Jun 7 00:01:26 Isis polkitd(authority=local): Registered Authentication Agent for… >>> More
cron.daily not running at the time it should?

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
My /etc/cron.daily scripts seem to be executing far later from what I understand they should. I am in Ubuntu and anacron is installed. If I do a sudo cat /var/log/syslog | grep cron I get something like: Aug 23 01:17:01 mymachine CRON[25171]: (root) CMD ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron… >>> More
mdadm cron job sends email that cron has run

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
I've got an Ubuntu 8.04 server using mdadm to create several RAID1 arrays. I created /etc/cron.hourly/mdadm as follows: #! /bin/sh set -e mdadm --monitor /dev/md0 /dev/md3 /dev/md4 --oneshot (Yes, the array numbers are not sequential, and I'm not using --scan beacuse I have a degraded array that… >>> More
Cron Tips for not running cron jobs on holidays (the monday of a three day weekend)

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
We have about a one hundred machine set-up with each machine running cron jobs like starting and stopping services and archiving these services' log files at the end of the day to a centralized repository. One headache we have is the three-day weekend (we're closed on holidays). We don't want the… >>> More
cron doesn't execute it's commands

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
I created an own small server with Debian. Last night i updated it. It created an error while generating the initrd and it didn't boot. Today i booted from another filesystem and did dpkg --configure -a with chroot. I also checked the filesystem. Now everything should be ok. But cron doesn't work:-(… >>> More

Developer IT