Crontab is blank on new install?

App_rpt-users
#1

Hey all,

I’m working on a friend’s node. He would like to remove the hourly IDs by commenting out the line in the Crontab -e. What’s odd is on my nodes the crontab -e does exactly that… It opens the crontab and in which condition you can edit the lines. However for his, crontab -e is simply a blank crontab. No comments and no hourly ID lines. There must be either some other crontab or other automation as the hourly IDs still do occur.

His node is a HamVOIP node (just created last month) running on a Raspberry Pi 3 B+

Thanks,
Jon K5DVT #40011,et. al

#2

Check to see if crontab is under another user ID (perhaps root). Also check the [schedule] stanza in rpt.conf to see if it’s kicking off the hourly announcement.

#3

I check all users and could not find another Crontab. The only one existed was for the root user, but it was blank, as was the Schedule stanza.

Did a little digging, thought to grep the log so I did. ( journalctl |grep CRON )
Got the following results (truncated because mostly repeated lines)

Nov 03 16:00:01 AllstarPi CROND[10408]: (root) CMD ((source /usr/local/etc/allstar.env ; /usr/bin/nice -19 /usr/bin/perl /usr/local/sbin/saytime.pl $NODE1 > /dev/null))
Nov 03 16:00:03 AllstarPi CROND[10407]: pam_unix(crond:session): session closed for user root
Nov 03 16:01:01 AllstarPi CROND[10448]: (root) CMD (run-parts /etc/cron.hourly)
Nov 03 17:01:01 AllstarPi CROND[12816]: (root) CMD (run-parts /etc/cron.hourly)

At least variations of these lines.
So I got to probing around in /etc/cron.hourly to try to reverse engineer this. (EE is my major, If you want CSCE you want my (now virtual) Roomate!)

So that brings us to the file /var/spool/cron

Oh boy! I see two files here: root and AllstarPi.tmp.XXXXrkr6BX! Sure the latter is it!

…Both of these files are blank. :frowning_face:

Going back to the grep, I see that the user root (what I am logged in as) is the one running these commands to do the hourly ID… even though when I do either crontab -e or crontab -u root -l all I get is a blank file.

~Jon, K5DVT