Sometimes, cron jobs may fail with the following error in Solaris
Error:
! cron cannot fork
Wed Nov 2 11:10:00 2005
! rescheduling a cron job Wed Nov 2 11:10:00 2005
This could happen, if the cron daemon has failed or crashed. The easist solution would be to restart the Cron daemon.
The following are the ways that you can restart Cron daemon. Perform them in the order and proceed to the next step only when the previous fails to fix the problem.
- Use Cron stop / Start
# cron stop
will try to stop Cron cleanly. And, then run
#cron start
This should start the cron daemon cleanly. Sometime, this may not help in which case, try the next step suggested below:
#/etc/init.d/cron stop
This will try to stop the cron daemon cleanly.
Start the daemon back by using:
#/etc/init.d/start
The /etc/init.d/cron script will have the proper handling for the FIFO file during the startup.
This should help. Should this still fail, try the following:
#/etc/rc2.d/S75cron stop
and
#/etc/rc2.d/S75cron start
This should help.