Cron job not logging output - Whenever gem - linux

I'm new to cron and started using Whenever gem to perform scheduled tasks. However, sometimes they stall and I have to restart the app for it to pick up again. So, I wanted to inspect the logs to see if there are any exceptions that might cause it.
According to this wiki, I put a line in my schedule.rb setting the output location:
set :output, "/var/log/cron.log"
But this file is always empty.
I tried doing manually from the terminal /bin/bash -l -c 'echo "hello" >> /var/log/cron.log 2>&1' and it saved hello to the log.
Any thoughts? Thank you.

Related

Conclusion of result of work of the Linux service?

Is automatically started as service at start of system a script. For example: myscript.service
Question - how to look through work (conclusion) of my script in real time. By analogy as though I have started the script from the terminal and I see a conclusion of work of a script.
service myscript status removes several lines and doesn't update a conclusion
journalctl -f -u myscript
Assuming you have used the systemd capabilities.
Either redirect> logs to the file and the tail -f command

Jenkins : bash script ran with nohup is neither working nor writing anything to log

BACKGROUND
I would like to explain the scenario properly here.
I am running jenkins_2.73.3 in my cloud server with ubuntu 16.04.
Currently, there are 3 users in the server:
root
develop-user (which I had created for many reasons such as test,deploy etc)
jenkins (which was created by jenkins ofcourse, I also added this jenkins user to sudoers group)
PROBLEM
I have a bash script that I am calling from a build step in Jenkins. Within this bash script,there is a nohup command for calling a separate deployScript in the background such as:
#!/bin/bash
nohup deployScript.sh > $WORKSPACE/app.log 2>&1 & echo $! > save_pid.txt
After the build step is completed, I see that a id is generated inside save_pid.txt but app.log is surprisingly empty. I can't kill any processes with this generated pid. So, that means there isn't any process created in the first place here. Also, the deployScript.sh does not seem to have any effect at all. It's just not working. This happens everytime I run the build in Jenkins. I can assure that there is nothing wrong with the deployScript.sh.
I have tried running this bash script with the develop-user manually without Jenkins and it works perfectly. Contents are written to the log file and also I can use the generated pid to kill the process. I have also tested this in my local environment and it works.
QUESTION
I have been looking at this for days. What might be the root cause here ?Where can I look into to see some logs or other info ? How is the pid generated whereas the log file is empty ? Is it a permission issue with the jenkins user ? Please help.
You can use below line inside the execute shell in jenkins to run it in background without the process being killed.
BUILD_ID=dontKillMe <command> &
So, it turned out to be a permission issue and also the script wasn't executable I guess as pointed out in the comments above.
So, now the bash script looks like below:
#!/bin/bash
sudo chmod a+x deployScript.sh
sudo nohup deployScript.sh > $WORKSPACE/app.log 2>&1 & echo $! > save_pid.txt
This works.

Cron / wget jobs intermittently not running - not getting into access log

I've a number of accounts running cron-started php jobs hourly.
The generic structure of the command is this:
wget -q -O - http://some.site.com/cron.php
Now, this used to be running just fine.
Lately, though, on a number of accounts it has started playing up - but only on this one server. Once or twice a day the php file is not run.
The access log is missing the relevant entry.
While the cron log shows that the job was run.
We've added a bit to the command to log things out (-o /tmp/logfile) but it shows nothing.
I'm at a loss, really. I'm looking for ideas what can be wrong, or how to sidestep this issue as it has started taking up way too much of my time.
Has anyone seen anything remotely like this?
Thanks in advance!
Try this command
wget -d -a /tmp/logfile -O - http://some.site.com/cron.php
With -q you turn off wget's output. With -d you turn on debug output (maybe -v for verbose output is already enough). With -a you append logging messages to /tmp/logfile instead of always creating a new file.
You can also use curl:
curl http://some.site.com/cron.php

How can I trigger a delayed system shutdown from in a shell script?

On my private network I have a backup server, which runs a bacula backup every night. To save energy I use a cron job to wake the server, but I haven't found out, how to properly shut it down after the backup is done.
By the means of the bacula-director configuration I can call a script during the processing of the last backup job (i.e. the backup of the file catalog). I tried to use this script:
#!/bin/bash
# shutdown server in 10 minutes
#
# ps, 17.11.2013
bash -c "nohup /sbin/shutdown -h 10" &
exit 0
The script shuts down the server - but apparently it returns just during the shutdown,
and as a consequence that last backup job hangs just until the shutdown. How can I make the script to file the shutdown and return immediately?
Update: After an extensive search I came up with a (albeit pretty ugly) solution:
The script run by bacula looks like this:
#!/bin/bash
at -f /root/scripts/shutdown_now.sh now + 10 minutes
And the second script (shutdown_now.sh) looks like this:
#!/bin/bash
shutdown -h now
Actually I found no obvious method to add the required parameters of shutdown in the syntax of the 'at' command. Maybe someone can give me some advice here.
Depending on your backup server’s OS, the implementation of shutdown might behave differently. I have tested the following two solutions on Ubuntu 12.04 and they both worked for me:
As the root user I have created a shell script with the following content and called it in a bash shell:
shutdown -h 10 &
exit 0
The exit code of the script in the shell was correct (tested with echo $?). The shutdown was still in progress (tested with shutdown -c).
This bash function call in a second shell script worked equally well:
my_shutdown() {
shutdown -h 10
}
my_shutdown &
exit 0
No need to create a second BASH script to run the shutdown command. Just replace the following line in your backup script:
bash -c "nohup /sbin/shutdown -h 10" &
with this:
echo "/sbin/poweroff" | /usr/bin/at now + 10 min >/dev/null 2>&1
Feel free to adjust the time interval to suit your preference.
If you can become root: either log in as, or sudo -i this works (tested on ubuntu 14.04):
# shutdown -h 20:00 & //halts the machine at 8pm
No shell script needed. I can then log out, and log back in, and the process is still there. Interestingly, if I tried this with sudo in the command line, then when I log out, the process does go away!
BTW, just to note, that I also use this command to do occasional reboots after everyone has gone home.
# shutdown -r 20:00 & //re-boots the machine at 8pm

How to make sure an application keeps running on Linux

I'm trying to ensure a script remains running on a development server. It collates stats and provides a web service so it's supposed to persist, yet a few times a day, it dies off for unknown reasons. When we notice we just launch it again, but it's a pain in the rear and some users don't have permission (or the knowhow) to launch it up.
The programmer in me wants to spend a few hours getting to the bottom of the problem but the busy person in me thinks there must be an easy way to detect if an app is not running, and launch it again.
I know I could cron-script ps through grep:
ps -A | grep appname
But again, that's another hour of my life wasted on doing something that must already exist... Is there not a pre-made app that I can pass an executable (optionally with arguments) and that will keep a process running indefinitely?
In case it makes any difference, it's Ubuntu.
I have used a simple script with cron to make sure that the program is running. If it is not, then it will start it up. This may not be the perfect solution you are looking for, but it is simple and works rather well.
#!/bin/bash
#make-run.sh
#make sure a process is always running.
export DISPLAY=:0 #needed if you are running a simple gui app.
process=YourProcessName
makerun="/usr/bin/program"
if ps ax | grep -v grep | grep $process > /dev/null
then
exit
else
$makerun &
fi
exit
Then add a cron job every minute, or every 5 minutes.
Monit is perfect for this :)
You can write simple config files which tell monit to watch e.g. a TCP port, a PID file etc
monit will run a command you specify when the process it is monitoring is unavailable/using too much memory/is pegging the CPU for too long/etc. It will also pop out an email alert telling you what happened and whether it could do anything about it.
We use it to keep a load of our websites running while giving us early warning when something's going wrong.
-- Your faithful employee, Monit
Notice: Upstart is in maintenance mode and was abandoned by Ubuntu which uses systemd. One should check the systemd' manual for details how to write service definition.
Since you're using Ubuntu, you may be interested in Upstart, which has replaced the traditional sysV init. One key feature is that it can restart a service if it dies unexpectedly. Fedora has moved to upstart, and Debian is in experimental, so it may be worth looking into.
This may be overkill for this situation though, as a cron script will take 2 minutes to implement.
#!/bin/bash
if [[ ! `pidof -s yourapp` ]]; then
invoke-rc.d yourapp start
fi
If you are using a systemd-based distro such as Fedora and recent Ubuntu releases, you can use systemd's "Restart" capability for services. It can be setup as a system service or as a user service if it needs to be managed by, and run as, a particular user, which is more likely the case in OP's particular situation.
The Restart option takes one of no, on-success, on-failure, on-abnormal, on-watchdog, on-abort, or always.
To run it as a user, simply place a file like the following into ~/.config/systemd/user/something.service:
[Unit]
Description=Something
[Service]
ExecStart=/path/to/something
Restart=on-failure
[Install]
WantedBy=graphical.target
then:
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user [status|start|stop|restart] something
No root privilege / modification of system files needed, no cron jobs needed, nothing to install, flexible as hell (see all the related service options in the documentation).
See also https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/User for more information about using the per-user systemd instance.
I have used from cron "killall -0 programname || /etc/init.d/programname start". kill will error if the process doesn't exist. If it does exist, it'll deliver a null signal to the process (which the kernel will ignore and not bother passing on.)
This idiom is simple to remember (IMHO). Generally I use this while I'm still trying to discover why the service itself is failing. IMHO a program shouldn't just disappear unexpectedly :)
Put your run in a loop- so when it exits, it runs again... while(true){ run my app.. }
I couldn't get Chris Wendt solution to work for some reason, and it was hard to debug. This one is pretty much the same but easier to debug, excludes bash from the pattern matching. To debug just run: bash ./root/makerun-mysql.sh. In the following example with mysql-server just replace the value of the variables for process and makerun for your process.
Create a BASH-script like this (nano /root/makerun-mysql.sh):
#!/bin/bash
process="mysql"
makerun="/etc/init.d/mysql restart"
if ps ax | grep -v grep | grep -v bash | grep --quiet $process
then
printf "Process '%s' is running.\n" "$process"
exit
else
printf "Starting process '%s' with command '%s'.\n" "$process" "$makerun"
$makerun
fi
exit
Make sure it's executable by adding proper file permissions (i.e. chmod 700 /root/makerun-mysql.sh)
Then add this to your crontab (crontab -e):
# Keep processes running every 5 minutes
*/5 * * * * bash /root/makerun-mysql.sh
The supervise tool from daemontools would be my preference - but then everything Dan J Bernstein writes is my preference :)
http://cr.yp.to/daemontools/supervise.html
You have to create a particular directory structure for your application startup script, but it's very simple to use.
first of all, how do you start this app? Does it fork itself to the background? Is it started with nohup .. & etc? If it's the latter, check why it died in nohup.out, if it's the first, build logging.
As for your main question: you could cron it, or run another process on the background (not the best choice) and use pidof in a bashscript, easy enough:
if [ `pidof -s app` -eq 0 ]; then
nohup app &
fi
You could make it a service launched from inittab (although some Linuxes have moved on to something newer in /etc/event.d). These built in systems make sure your service keeps running without writing your own scripts or installing something new.
It's a job for a DMD (daemon monitoring daemon). there are a few around; but I usually just write a script that checks if the daemon is running, and run if not, and put it in cron to run every minute.
Check out 'nanny' referenced in Chapter 9 (p197 or thereabouts) of "Unix Hater's Handbook" (one of several sources for the book in PDF).
A nice, simple way to do this is as follows:
Write your server to die if it can't listen on the port it expects
Set a cronjob to try to launch your server every minute
If it isn't running it'll start, and if it is running it won't. In any case, your server will always be up.
I think a better solution is if you test the function, too. For example, if you had to test an apache, it is not enough only to test, if "apache" processes on the systems exist.
If you want to test if apache OK is, then try to download a simple web page, and test if your unique code is in the output.
If not, kill the apache with -9 and then do a restart. And send a mail to the root (which is a forwarded mail address to the roots of the company/server/project).
It's even simplier:
#!/bin/bash
export DISPLAY=:0
process=processname
makerun="/usr/bin/processname"
if ! pgrep $process > /dev/null
then
$makerun &
fi
You have to remember though to make sure processname is unique.
One can install minutely monitoring cronjob like this:
crontab -l > crontab;echo -e '* * * * * export DISPLAY=":0.0" && for
app in "eiskaltdcpp-qt" "transmission-gtk" "nicotine";do ps aux|grep
-v grep|grep "$app";done||"$app" &' >> crontab;crontab crontab
disadvantage is that the app names you enter have to be found in ps aux|grep "appname" output and at same time being able to be launched using that name: "appname" &
also you can use the pm2 library.
sudo apt-get pm2
And if its a node app can install.
Sudo npm install pm2 -g
them can run the service.
linux service:
sudo pm2 start [service_name]
npm service app:
pm2 start index.js

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