SOLVED The service “crond” appears to be down.

[USA_Webmaster]

Hello cPanel forums and thanks for your time and attention.



What would cause "The service “crond” appears to be down." cPanel Monitoring notification email alerts after a graceful WHM system update / reboot?

I was two days late to the party and received a few hundred of these emails and the number of automated restart attempts was 250+.

1. What do you recommend in a situation like this? A graceful restart?
2. Can this be prevented (automatically) in the future?
3. When service crond is down, what type of (negative) things can happen to accounts and what not?

After I SSHd into server I ran commands:

• service crond status
• service crond restart
• service crond status

I stopped getting email alerts and it looks to be fixed.

source 1

UPDATE #1: After 10 minutes I started getting the email alerts again so now I'm doing a graceful restart.

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Also, is crond service the Cron Service? I search the cpanel docs and click first couple of links and CTRL + F "crond" in page but nothing pops up.

i.imgur.com/eqX0bb7.gif

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Service Check Method:
The system’s command to check or to restart this service failed.

Service Check Raw Output:
(XID azqf6x) The “crond” service is down.
The subprocess “/usr/local/cpanel/scripts/restartsrv_crond” reported error number 3 when it ended.

Startup Log:
systemd[1]: Started Command Scheduler.
systemd[1]: Starting Command Scheduler...
crond[2532829]: crond: can't lock /var/run/crond.pid, otherpid may be 573: Resource temporarily unavailable
systemd[1]: crond.service: main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
systemd[1]: Unit crond.service entered failed state.
systemd[1]: crond.service failed.

Memory Information:
Used    5.1 GB
Available    10.41 GB
Installed    15.51 GB

Load Information:
1.02 0.66 0.44

 

[cPanelLauren]

What would cause "The service “crond” appears to be down." cPanel Monitoring notification email alerts after a graceful WHM system update / reboot?

That's really hard to say without information on the status of the server at the time it's occurring.

• What do you recommend in a situation like this? A graceful restart?

• Can this be prevented (automatically) in the future?

• When service crond is down, what type of (negative) things can happen to accounts and what not?

• Usually a graceful restart should resolve it but you should want to identify the source of the issue - the cron logs should be helpful
• As far as prevention goes, that really is up to understanding why it occurred.
• When crond is down no cron jobs will be run, cPanel, as well as many of the system's services/sites, rely on cron jobs to automate activities.

After I SSHd into server I ran commands:

• service crond status
• service crond restart
• service crond status

I stopped getting email alerts and it looks to be fixed.

That's great news

UPDATE #1: After 10 minutes I started getting the email alerts again so now I'm doing a graceful restart.

So to confirm after the restart is this issue still continuing or has it stopped?

Also, is crond service the Cron Service?

Yes it is


I'm curious about this error though it may be hard to determine why it's happening:

crond[2532829]: crond: can't lock /var/run/crond.pid, otherpid may be 573: Resource temporarily unavailable

Based on this error it seems like you might have had an old crond process running which was potentially locked/stale and when chksrvd attempted to restart it, it was seeing the old process. You might check the cron logs at

/var/log/cron

for any potentially useful information as well.


Thanks!

 

[USA_Webmaster]

Brilliant breakdown and well detailed. Thank you for the tip to the check the cron log.

Yes. A graceful restart fixed everything magically and the crond notification was no longer being sent. I don't often like to do graceful restarts but that was the right fix.

 

[USA_Webmaster]

How do I mark my own thread as solved @cPanelLauren ? Is that somethinig only forum admins can do?

 

[cPanelLauren]

Hi @USA_Webmaster

You're most welcome and I'm really glad it helped! I'll mark your thread as solved for you (I think only we are able to do that)


Thanks!