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Re: cron copy on network drives


From: Paul Hodor
Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2005 08:13:36 -0800 (PST)

Hi,

I am trying to set up a cron service to update some directories on a
network drive, but I ran into a problem.

This copy command works from the command-line:
cp -a -u -v //mydrive/myshare/dir1/* //mydrive/myshare/dir2 >> log 2>&1

However, if I run it with cron I get the following error:
cp: cannot stat `//mydrive/myshare/dir1/*': No such file or directory

Do I need to use a different syntax for the path or am I doing
something else wrong? I am running Windows XP Professional version 2002
SP1 and cygwin DLL version 1.5.12.

Thanks,
Paul


I think I've run into this very problem. Are you running cron as a different user than your login (such as SYSTEM)? My understanding is that in that case, cron has a limited form of su which does not allow it to fully authenticate as you when accessing network drives. So, it tries to su to your login when it runs your cron job, but cannot read or write to network drives you have mapped.


Unfortunately, I don't know a workaround for this. You could have cron map the network drive itself (using 'net use') but that would probably require a password - in plain text! You could also run cron as yourself so it actually uses your login (rather than trying to su), but that means every time you login you have to start cron and it won't be running after you log out!

You might be able to get around this by using ssh instead of network drives (a combination of a ssh server on the remote machine and ssh-agent to avoid plaintext passwords in your cron job script, maybe).

That's how it was explained to me, anyway. HTH!

--
Bryan Thrall
Realtime Software Engineer
FlightSafety International

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