Thanks for your post, ShelLuser. Full disclosure, I did, in fact, come over from Linux early in the dumpster fire that calls itself systemd, approximately 2014. Prior to that, I was a Linux guy for almost 20 years. However, I have also been a professional sysadmin for 25 years. I have worked with not only Linux, but other Unixes, including SunOS, Solaris, DEC Unix, HP-UX, AIX, BSDi, PC-BSD/TrueOS, and now FreeBSD.
I did not intentionally break my environment, which makes me think that it is something subtle.
I find it hard to believe that cron wouldn't start without giving any reason(s) for it in the system logfile.
I wouldn't either...And yet, I rebooted my desktop machine at 16:57 EDT. The tail of my
/var/log/messages:
Code:
Jun 11 16:55:00 defiant /usr/sbin/cron[48959]: (operator) CMD (/usr/libexec/save-entropy)
Jun 11 16:55:00 defiant /usr/sbin/cron[48960]: (root) CMD (/usr/libexec/atrun)
...And nothing in
/var/log/messages:
Code:
root@defiant:/home/storm # grep -i cron /var/log/messages
root@defiant:/home/storm #
I see the same behavior on my laptop.
Still, this leads up to: what things did you change on your machine? Because this is most certainly not out of the box behavior, so you changed something which caused all this.
I did not
change anything system-wise. I did the FreeBSD install, then I installed a selection of packages. The only "changes" I made were in my own user environment.
Did you, perhaps, change the root shell to something obscure? Or maybe you messed around in the base system? Something I've seen Linux users do: dump bash into /bin and then being surprised that some things stopped working when they replaced one of the default shells.
Absolutely not! I learned long ago that you
never, ever mess with the root environment. I also left bash where it belongs in
/usr/local/bin:
Code:
root@defiant:/home/storm # echo $SHELL
/bin/csh
root@defiant:/home/storm # which bash
/usr/local/bin/bash
I could also imagine a situation in which only the base system is mounted and as a result the system doesn't have access to the root shell just yet. Not a common situation but I've experienced something similar to this before.
On my desktop, I have two zpools. The main one, NX74205, is on a mirrored pair of SSDs, and has the bulk of the system on it. The second pool, NCC1764, is on a mirrored pair of 1TB spinning drives, and has stuff on it that is either non-standard, or would probably wear out the SSDs faster:
Code:
NCC1764/usr/git 2.31G 821G 2.31G /usr/git
NCC1764/usr/ports 1.00G 821G 206M /usr/ports
NCC1764/usr/src 96K 821G 96K /usr/src
NCC1764/usr/virtualbox 74.2G 821G 43.7G /usr/virtualbox
The laptop, OTOH, has a single pool across two SSDs.
Either way... /var/log/cron is your friend here. Unless of course syslogd also isn't running; have you checked with service syslogd status
? It would make sense if this wasn't limited to just cron. Or.... you changed stuff yourself in /etc/syslog.conf which could obscure some log messages.
So yeah, dozens of possible options here. One thing seems certain to me: this was self inflicted somehow.
syslogd is running, while
cron is not:
Code:
root@defiant:/home/storm # service syslogd status
syslogd is running as pid 2246.
root@defiant:/home/storm # service cron status
cron is not running.
And I have not changed
/etc/syslog.conf on either system, nor have I added or subtracted anything from
/etc/syslog.d or
/usr/local/etc/syslog.d
I'm trying to weed through the possibilities, but this one was beyond me. The reason I posted is that I checked the basic things, but I am hoping someone can help me find the more obscure things that it might be. I am still a vanilla FreeBSD n00b, so hopefully the experts can help.
Thanks,
--vr