Re: (CRON) DEATH (can't fork)

[matthew sporleder <msporleder%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 6:13 AM,  <raymond.meyer%rambler.ru@localhost> wrote:
> $ uname -a
> NetBSD ultra10 5.0_BETA NetBSD 5.0_BETA (GENERIC) #0: Tue Feb  3
> 21:25:22 GMT 2009
> root@p3smp:/opt/obj.sparc64/sys/arch/sparc64/compile/GENERIC sparc64
>
> My /var/log/cron.log file is filled with the following lines:
>
> Feb  3 22:53:17 ultra10 cron[397]: (CRON) DEATH (can't fork)
> Feb  8 11:46:38 ultra10 cron[402]: (CRON) DEATH (can't fork)
> Feb  9 10:54:43 ultra10 cron[343]: (CRON) DEATH (can't fork)
>
> Once the system has booted multiuser and I manually run
>
> /etc/rc.d/cron start
>
> then cron starts without problems.
>
> I have /var/run mounted as tmpfs, but I also have
>
> critical_filesystems_local="${critical_filesystems_local} /var/run /opt"
>
> in my /etc/rc.conf file.
>
> Any idea what the problem might be?
>

Sadly, that error just means the daemon() call failed but it doesn't
report errno.

Do you have swap?  Do you have a really low ulimit?  Is cron trying to
start twice?

You could also change line 100 of cron.c to be more like:
log_it("CRON",getpid(),"DEATH",errno,"can't fork");

to get more info.  (you may also need to #include <errno.h> if you go
down that path)