[RndTbl] SCO cron hangs "Cannot create temporary file"

John Lange john at johnlange.ca
Fri May 8 09:53:23 CDT 2009


Being the only "*nix" person in our office, I've been designated to fix
a problem on a old SCO server.

I know what you're thinking because I thought the same thing; "it's a
dream come true!" but I didn't let my enthusiasm show.

The problem is that cron was "hanging" in the middle of the night
roughly every second day. The log show that it was throwing an error:
"Cannot create temporary file" around 4:30am every second day, but the
exact time and process running isn't always the same.

/tmp and /usr/tmp are normal looking and there should be enough free
disk space so that isn't the problem.

Thinking that maybe something was suddenly chewing up disk and then
being cleared I setup a little cron to log disk usage every 15 minutes.

Now cron hangs _every day_ at about 16:30!

In order to restart cron, its FIFO pipe file has to be deleted and the
box rebooted.

Again, disk usage is not a problem.

Anyone know anything about how SCO cron works?

-- 
John Lange
http://www.johnlange.ca



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