[SOLVED] Crontab newb issue

L3l00 · #1 5th July 2012, 08:17 PM

I apologize if i placed this in the wrong directory, could seriously use some help.

I am sort of new to "crontab" and trying my hardest to get it to work properly with Fedora 17 (64-bit).

(For privacy reasons I am using just he beginning letter for the user name)

this is what I am doing.

Code:

sudo env EDITOR=nano crontab -u j -e

Then I placed this in:

Code:

     0          17              *       *               *   /sbin/shutdown -h now

saved then exited, then did.

Code:

sudo service crond restart

this is not working....

axel2078 · #2 5th July 2012, 08:31 PM

I have no idea what the sudo command you entered does aside from setting your editor to nano. It looks like your crontab is scheduled to halt (not shutdown) your system every day at 5 pm. Is that what you intended to do? Who is the cron running under? I'm guessing that since you used sudo, it's still using your environment variables instead of root's. What I normally do when creating a new cron job is become root (su -) and then do crontab -e to do whatever I need. Remember that there is a difference between doing something as root and doing it via sudo.

marko · #3 5th July 2012, 08:39 PM

Well, the immediate problem I see is that the crontab is being made for a user called "j" via the crontab -u option
if that "j" account can't run shutdown for halt then it's not going to work. Is there in fact a user account "j", try:

Quote:

id -a j

If there is a user 'j' then you'll see the user uid and group uid info for j

Why aren't you just having root do the shutdown?

L3l00 · #4 5th July 2012, 08:58 PM

hmmm okay

yes you are right for the first one the:

Code:

sudo env EDITOR=nano

opens crontab in nano instead of vi, vi is such a pain in my opinion.

so if i were to go under root (The "j" is an admin on the server) then type:

Code:

env EDITOR=nano crontab -e

It should open up the right way and take of the -h, I know h does halt previously I had it just "shutdown now."

But yes I would like to Server to just Shutdown completely at five.

This server has a Grub password loader, not much of an issue but would it be possible to have it turn itself on at a certain time, would I have to remove the grub password if I want it to just go automatically to the welcome screen?

---------- Post added at 01:45 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:41 PM ----------

when I enter in

Code:

crontab -l

inside root, it lists the things I posted so it should be working.

---------- Post added at 01:58 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:45 PM ----------

Code:

su -

then

Code:

env EDITOR=nano crontab -e

entered in the code:

Code:

0 15 * * * /sbin/shutdown now

then:

Code:

service crond restart

I tested this by putting in something similar to shutdown within three minutes, employees out to lunch so it was okay. Sure enough it clicked off. ^-^