[PLUG] Mail log reporting: cron issue?

[wes]

On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 6:47 AM, Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com>wrote:

>   Each time I think the mail log reporting issue is resolved I find that it
> is not.
>
>   Yesterday I received one of the two reports, today none. Both days the
> results of the 'set' command was mailed to me showing that the process
> supposedly ran and exited with the success code of '0'. That the 19th line
> of /etc/cron.daily/1pflogsumm (set -x > log_error.txt 2>&1) is processed by
> the shell and the results e-mailed to me suggests that the 1pflogsumm
> script
> has actually been run, but the mailed report has not been appended to my
> INBOX (/var/spool/mail/rshepard).
>
>   I can manually run /usr/local/bin/pflogsumm (using the options in the
> shell script)and the report is written to stdout; did so just now. However,
> today I cannot manually run /etc/cron.daily/1pflogsumm; yesterday I could.
>
>   This all leads me to believe that the problem is primarily with invoking
> the shell script. Why the results of the set command are delivered to my
> inbox while the results of the rest of the script are not makes on sense to
> me. Here are relevant entries from the procmail log:
>
> >From root at salmo.appl-ecosys.com  Thu May 21 00:02:02 2009
>  Subject: salmo Daily Mail Report for Thursday, 21 May 2009
>   Folder: /var/spool/mail/rshepard
>
> >From root at salmo.appl-ecosys.com  Thu May 21 00:02:06 2009
>  Subject: cron: /etc/cron.daily/1pflogsumm
>   Folder: /var/spool/mail/rshepard
>
> >From root at salmo.appl-ecosys.com  Fri May 22 00:02:06 2009
>  Subject: cron: /etc/cron.daily/1pflogsumm
>   Folder: /var/spool/mail/rshepard
>
>   The first entry is /etc/cron.daily/1pflogsumm run from root's crontab.
> The
> second entry is the log_error.txt mailed from that invocation of the
> script.
> While other scripts in /etc/cron.daily ran at 04:40 yesterday, 1pflogsumm
> did not.
>
>   The third entry is the log_error.tex from this morning's invocation of
> 1pflogsumm in root's crontab, not the usual daily run of all scripts at
> 04:40.
>
>   None of this makes sense to me as it is inconsistent. What more can I do
> to test to try to find what's happening? Is it a cron issue somehow? I am
> stymied and frustrated that this cannot be quickly resolved.
>
> Rich
>

I haven't been following this little adventure of yours all that closely, so
please forgive me if this has been suggested before.

What about putting a statement in the 1pflogsumm script itself to log to a
file each time it is run? You could stick something like the following near
the beginning:

echo $(date) >> /tmp/1pflogsumm.log

Then at least you can eliminate cron as a possible suspect.

Then we can start expanding what gets logged from the script. And someday
you will be logging so much, that we'll have to create a script to summarize
the log for you. it'll be called 2pflogsummlogsumm and we can begin the
whole process over again!

-wes