Infrastructure Software

Hi,

I've just noticed a few problems with a recent install of Solaris 10.
Firstly crontab -e wouldn't work, I fixed this by setting EDITOR to vi and then export EDITOR so now at least I can edit the crontab file (as root).

But I can't get cron to run
.
# ps -ef | grep cron
root 7579 7162 0 21:20:45 pts/2 0:00 grep cron

# cat cron.allow
root

# cat cron.deny
daemon
bin
nuucp
listen
nobody
noaccess

svcadm enable cron
or
svcadm restart cron
does not get it up and running
(I'm logged in as root)

If I edit as root using crontab -e when I :wq! I get a message
"cron may not be running - call your system administrator" ..... I am the system administrator :-)

At first I thought it might just be my installation of Solaris 10 so I went to another box, installed and set up by someone else and had exactly the same problems.

Although it looks pretty dead both boxes ran a Sun explorer at 3am this morning, I just went into the first box to try and add a script to run a few backup jobs and noticed it not running.
So to test I added a line into cron touch /test (I ran this on a Solaris 9 box in cron to verify it should work) waited for the clock to tick over and nothing.
So I changed the time in cron and ran the svcadm restart cron still nothing and again with svcadm disable cron and svcadm enable cron, worryingly there is no output, at worst I'd expect "ERROR" or maybe even at best "cron stopped" and "cron started"

From what I can gather ps -ef | grep cron should show me something like /usr/sbin/cron if it's running.

I've also checked /etc/cron.d/ and there is no FIFO lock file.

Version is SunOS ###### 5.10 Generic_127127-11 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-880

Has anyone any ideas?