Have you lost your cron

A minimal installation of a new Linux box feel just about right. You can feel the power of Linux as it just sits there and waits for the tasks you can throw at it. This, or something alike it, I felt when I installed a minimal CentOS on my new server.

A couple of yum’s later I was quite happy with the new box and it was running along fine. There are always some scripts that you want to run daily and thus adding some script to crontab was a no brainer. Well, it was no brainer until I figured that my scripts did not run! What happened?

Crontab is installed. Running the scripts manually also works. Nothing obvious did go wrong.

As it turns out, I did not install the additional crontab tools. Those are, which I learned by now, not available with a simple “yum install crontabs”, but are in a different package all together. So, for the sake of the after world, ’cause Google yield almost no results to my searching, this is the additional install you have to do;

yum install vixie*

This will install the crond, crontab, etc. scripts for you. Now, all you need to do is to add the crond script to chkconfig and start the service.