Tandy XENIX 3.01.02 cron sudden death

[lyndon at ncc.UUCP]

In article <124 at petro.UUCP> jrb at petro.UUCP (Jon Boede) writes:
>We have had problems with the cron daemon summarily taking unexplained
>vacations.  Local authorities are stumped, the cunning crontab crook comes 
>creeping under curious circumstances, usually when the machine has been up
>and running for some period of time.
>  [...]
>"Death of a cron run" occurs infrequently,
>but it is terribly frustrating.

I have seen this happen under CTIX as well. It happened on a very
sporadic basis. No core dumps were found. The only evidence was a
error return in the accounting logs when cron tried to fork at startup.

We don't have source, however I grabbed a copy of the binaries on the
failing machine and brought them across to our (identical) system. A
byte for byte comparison showed the files to be identical. I then
shipped our /etc/cron to the other system and installed it. No problems
noted for over three weeks.

Hmmm... Installed suspect version on our system. This time it lasted
three days before failing... Again a byte comparison was done. Again
they matched.

We eventually reinstalled everything from the distribution tape, and
haven't run into the problem since. It's still one of the great
unsolved mysteries though...
-- 
Lyndon Nerenberg - Nexus Computing Corp. - lyndon at ncc.UUCP
UUCP: {ihnp4,ubc-vision,vax135,watmath}!alberta!ncc!lyndon