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sonriks

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HPUX / reboot and crontab

Hi folks,

The past two times I've had to reboot a particular HPUX server, one of the user's crontab file in /var/spool/cron/crontabs .... (only one particular user) gets zero'ed out. All the other files in the dir remain intact.  Any ideas on where to start looking for the cause?

Thanks
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dfke

Maybe the user is listed in /var/adm/cron/cron.deny or not listed in /var/adm/cron/cron.allow.
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ASKER

the login is listed in the /var/adm/cron/cron.allow file
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slightwv (䄆 Netminder)

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there are no references in init.d dir to the username whose crontab file is  being reinitialized.
Do you have support with hp?  You might want to contact them on this one.

how much data is on this machine?  Can you afford to run that find/grep from '/'?

Can you reboot again?

Thinking maybe set the permissions to read only and change the owner to root.  reboot and see if anything shows up in the rc log about trying to reset/remove/touch that file.
check all possible hardware logs.
I suspect a filesystem structure error for that particular file, probably borne from disk wear and following read error.

this usually happens to mail spool directories in 5 years...
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Investigation showed that there was a startup script whichpurged this particular user's crontab file.
thanks!