Re: Can't start cron daemon in Cygwin 1.5.23 under WinXP SP2

[Steve Rowley <sgr at alum dot mit dot edu>]

[Summary: no significant directory permission problems; after fixing
 even what looked like small problems, the cron daemon still will not
 start.  Any more suggestions?  I'm willing to try just about anything.]

>Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 10:38:29 +0100 (CET)
>From: Marco Atzeri <marco_atzeri at yahoo dot it>
>
>--- Steve Rowley <sgr@alum.mit.edu> ha scritto:
>>     >Event Type:	Error
>>     >Event Source:	cron
>>     >Event Category:	None
>>     >Event ID:	0
>>     >Date:		1/22/2007
>>     >Time:		11:00:27 PM
>>     >User:		NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
>>     >Computer:	CBDWB00033
>>     >Description:
>>     >The description for Event ID ( 0 ) in Source (
>> cron ) cannot be found. The local computer may not
>> have the necessary registry information or message
>> DLL files to display messages from a remote
>> computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE=
>> flag to retrieve this description; see Help and
>> Support for details. The following information is
>> part of the event: cron: PID 304: starting service
>> `cron' failed: fork: 11, Resource temporarily
>> unavailable.
>> 
>> Any idea what to make of that?
>
>possible issue:
>the user SYSTEM has no enough permission to execute
>or to write in certain directories.
>use
>   ls -l
>or
>   getfacl
>to check permissions of the involved file/directories.
>
>For me, some changes of permission 
>from 700 to 755 or 750
>solved a similar problem with OpenSSH and NFS .
>
>SYSTEM belongs to the administrators group
>but it is not admin/root
> 
>$ grep SYSTEM /etc/passwd
>SYSTEM:*:18:544:,S-1-5-18::
>
>$ grep 544 /etc/group
>Administrators:S-1-5-32-544:544:

Fair enough; thanks for the suggestion.  Though I remind you of 2
things:

(1) the cron setup was created by the cron-config script, which should
    know whereof it speaks re permissions, and

(2) cron_diagnose.sh gave my setup a clean bill of health, including
    the permissions it checked.

Nevertheless, since you were good enough to make a concrete
suggestion, I went hunting in /var, /var/cron, and /var/log for
directories with odd ownership and/or permissions.  The only thing I
could find was that /var/proftpd was owned by user SYSTEM, group
Administrators while everything else was owned by me and group Users.

So I did this:

>$ chown -Rv `id -un`:Users /var/proftpd/ && chmod -fR ugo+rwx /var/proftpd/

Then killed & restart the cron service, with unchanged results:

>$ cygrunsrv --stop cron && cygrunsrv --remove cron 
>$ cron-config
>Do you want to install the cron daemon as a service? (yes/no) yes
>
>The service can run either as yourself or under a privileged account.
>Running as yourself allows better access to network drives,
>but does not allow to run the crontab of other users.
>Do you want to the cron daemon to run as yourself? (yes/no) no
>
>
>Do you want the daemon to run with ntsec? (yes/no) yes
>
>
>Do you want to start the cron daemon as a service now? (yes/no) yes
>cygrunsrv: Error starting a service: QueryServiceStatus:  Win32 error 1053:
>The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.
>
>
>In case of problem, examine the log file for cron,
>/var/log/cron.log, and the Windows event log
>for information about the problem cron is having.
>
>If you cannot fix the problem, then report it to cygwin@cygwin.com.
>Please include a copy of your crontab, ('crontab -l')
>and the output of 'cygcheck -srv > cygcheck.txt'.
>
>Please include the generated file 'cygcheck.txt' *as an attachment*,
>and NOT in the body of the mail message.

So I found no directories whose permissions could be changed to fix
the problem.  This is unsurprising to me, given that cron-config and
cron_diagnose.sh are both apparently happy with the permissions.

Any more suggestions, anyone?
-- 
Steve Rowley <sgr@alum.mit.edu> http://alum.mit.edu/www/sgr/ Skype: sgr000
It is very dark & after 2000.  If you continue, you are likely to be eaten by a bleen.



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