Crond always stop by itself

[hbhb]

I just notice a problem in my server where the crond always stop by itself in the server when I do a weekly backup maintenance, I found out that my daily backup is outdate and my crond status is not running

root@pserver [~]# service crond status
crond dead but pid file exists

So I had to restart crond to make it run. This happen to same last 2 weeks ago as well. what/how do I check from the server, as I am not familiar, is there a log or something to trace this?

Or anybody with such experience can explain and give a solution directly..

Thanks a lot!

[JPC-Shaun]

Hi;

Verify from ps aux do you see the crond as a zombie. The /etc/init.d/crond and service crond aren't much reliable, you should first "killall crond", and then manually delete the crond pid file, usually /var/run/crond.pid or /var/run/crond/crond.pid, if you can't find it in either location, try "cat /etc/init.d/crond" and read the script where it puts the pid file in, start the crond and "ps aux" to see if there's a process named [crond] with user crond.

The cron logs are located at /var/spool/cron.