word of caution if cron email box gets full!

[Red Squirrel]

I was trying to figure out why my backups have not run since February 1st. I lost tons of data due to this in a HDD failure. Everything since Feb1, gone.

Well turns out my cron mailbox got full (postfix default is 50MB) so the jobs were no longer running!

I fixed that by adding this line in /etc/potsfix/main.cf

mailbox_size_limit=0

This makes it unlimited. This is different then mail quotas I think, as the error produced in the logs was more cryptic, like a system error, rather then "inbox over quota" or something.

So just a random tidbit of info so no one does the same mistake as me, up that limit!

 

[LuckyTaxi]

great to know!

 

[kamper]

your backups weren't running because your mailbox was up to quota? why?

 

[Red Squirrel]

Have no idea, guess if cron fails to send out the email it stops running jobs till its resolved, or something. My question is also, why? The email can only be sent after the job is done, so have no idea how it would even know, unless it just writes directly to the mailbox instead.

 

[Nothinman]

Cron doesn't send mail until after a job runs and that's only if the job prints anything to stdout, I'd guess that something else was causing your jobs to fail.