Re: Cron jobs stopped working : can't lock cron.pid .. Resouce temporarily unavailable

["Pierre A. Humblet" <Pierre dot Humblet at ieee dot org>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "sam naqvi" <>
To: <cygwin@cygwin.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 09, 2009 11:48 AM


|i had setup some cron jobs on cygwin last Friday. a few of them were test scripts to see if the
cron is firing smoothly on the right time without errors. And there were some actual scripts
too.
| It was working fine on Friday, giving output to all the test scripts at correct times.
|
| however, it did not work for the jobs that it had to run over the weekend. in fact, now, it
does not even run the test scripts.
|
| an error that i could locate in var/log/Cygwin\ cron.log  file is as follows:
| /usr/sbin/cron: can't lock /var/run/cron.pid, otherpid may be 9556: Resource temporarily
unavailable
| please see the attachment for details.
|
| i have gone through the cygwin mail archives and general google search on any similar reported
problem. this problem looks similar (http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2008-05/msg00280.html) but
i could not understand what is causing a lock in my case and how to fix it. i am a beginner in
cygwin crons and could not find the problem or the cause of it. can someone please help here?

****************
You are running the cron daemon as SYSTEM on a Windows 2003 Enterprise Server.
On such a system the demon cannot change user context (setuid), thus the jobs don't run.

According to the log, you started using SYSTEM on May 12 but on May 13 you were able to
successfully run the daemon under a user named EXSAN. However on Jun 5 at 20:34:54
you reverted to using SYSTEM.... All of that is clearly visible in the cronbug.txt file you
sent us.

The message "can't lock /var/run/cron.pid" probably indicates that you are trying to start
a new cron while one is already running.

Looks like you are not using cron-config to configure and start the daemon.

Pierre


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