HI Folks,
I recently migrated my VM server over to a new hosting company. One of the mystifying issues that has arisen is that "cron job" error messages are appearing in my mailbox.
I don't have background on "cron jobs" so please bear with me. Are "cron jobs" optional backup commands or similar that I can simply delete from the system? Are there any cron jobs that I have to leave running that are essential to WM/VM's performance?
the error email had only this it its body:
/bin/sh: /home/mydomain/homes/domains/.usermin/mailbox/auto.pl: No such file or directory
are "cron jobs" something that could be put in place by a hacker? this why I am asking if it is safe to delete these jobs.
thanks,
Gary
when I do a search using my domain names in the CRON JOBS module ("there are too many to list" - it says), I get a cron job on webalizer and one on awestats for each domain i have hosted.
i did a search on "usr" and there's a "mailman" cron job with this listing: /usr/lib/mailman/cron/mailpasswds
of course, being a VM newbie, this raises all kinds of red flags, like my passwords are being mailed out to "who"...?
Gary
I don't have background on "cron jobs" so please bear with me. Are "cron jobs" optional backup commands or similar that I can simply delete from the system? Are there any cron jobs that I have to leave running that are essential to WM/VM's performance?
Cron jobs are tasks setup to run at some particular interval (sometimes daily, sometimes hourly, or perhaps some other interval... it depends on the job).
Many of them are quite important, so I wouldn't be too quick to disable them :-)
As far as what you're describing though -- that particular cron job (mailbox/auto.pl) is for Usermin users who have setup a retention policy for their emails.
For example, they could configure Usermin to delete all emails in the Trash folder to be deleted after 30 days, and all email in the Spam folder to be deleted after a week.
It sounds like auto.pl wasn't correctly setup when that Virtual Server was restored (which may be a bug). It would be safe to remove that particular cron job. Or, you could have that user re-setup their retention policies for their email, which would setup auto.pl for them again.
i did a search on "usr" and there's a "mailman" cron job with this listing: /usr/lib/mailman/cron/mailpasswds
That's actually not a Virtualmin thing, that's a Mailman thing.
That file is a legitimate file distributed with Mailman... each month, Mailman emails each user on each mailing list a reminder that they're on the mailing list, and I believe their mailman password is included in that email.
Looking at the code, it looks like that file above is what sends out those monthly reminders.
I hope that helps!
-Eric