Plesk 11's scheduled maintenance tasks not being run?

[BurrellS]

As of some point in the past few months, it appears the scheduled maintenance tasks that Plesk performs are not longer running automatically. We no longer get emails when a domain / subscription is nearing expiry, or when someone is over their quota. for example.

This is on Plesk 11 on CentOS 6.

Any suggestions as to what I should check or fix to ensure that the scheduled maintenance tasks run again?

 

[UFHH01]

You could check at "Start > Tools & Settings > Notifications" , if the desired notifications are set correctly and you could try to uncheck and check specific notifications ( always with a confirmation over the "o.k." - button ) to force Plesk to rewrite the configuration. If this doesn't help, a futher investigation of the crontab - logs ( for Centos they are supposed to be at: /var/log/cron ) could point to issues.

 

[BurrellS]

I found these errors / warnings in /var/log/cron :

Oct 2 00:01:01 hosting6 anacron[15990]: Anacron started on 2014-10-02
Oct 2 00:01:01 hosting6 anacron[15990]: Job `cron.daily' locked by another anacron - skipping
Oct 2 00:01:01 hosting6 anacron[15990]: Normal exit (0 jobs run)

Nothing else should have it "locked" at this time - this lock may be why it is not being run daily. Maybe it crashed while running and left the lock in place.

I manually ran the cron.daily scripts using :
nice run-parts /etc/cron.daily

...which is what anacron seems to usually try to do (if the lock wasn't preventing it).
Still running away now.


Where can I remove the lock that anacron believes is in place?
I checked /var/lock, and the only thing I found that looked like it could relate is a file called /var/lock/subsys/crond

Any ideas would be appreciated.

 

[UFHH01]

Did you check with "ps -aux | grep anacron" if there are probably still some tasks running? If yes, please kill them with "kill -9 PID-ID" and re-run your maintenance tasks manually, explained at this link from the knowledge-base:

How to rerun daily maintenance tasks separately ( KB 114797 )​

 

[BurrellS]

anacron was running, with an August date on the process; I killed anacron from there, and restarted it fresh. I thought I had checked for anacron using ps previously, but I must not have if that process was in there still running/locked up from early August.

The logs now say :

Oct 4 16:33:32 hosting6 crontab[790]: (root) BEGIN EDIT (root)
Oct 4 16:33:41 hosting6 crontab[790]: (root) END EDIT (root)
Oct 4 16:33:53 hosting6 anacron[819]: Anacron started on 2014-10-04
Oct 4 16:33:53 hosting6 anacron[819]: Will run job `cron.daily' in 18 min.
Oct 4 16:33:53 hosting6 anacron[819]: Jobs will be executed sequentially


and then later ...

Oct 4 16:51:53 hosting6 anacron[819]: Job `cron.daily' started
Oct 4 16:51:53 hosting6 run-parts(/etc/cron.daily)[2905]: starting 00webalizer
Oct 4 16:51:58 hosting6 run-parts(/etc/cron.daily)[2926]: finished 00webalizer
Oct 4 16:51:58 hosting6 run-parts(/etc/cron.daily)[2905]: starting 50plesk-daily

 

[BurrellS]

Thank you, UFHH01, for your assistance with this! The daily tasks seemed have run on their own as normal last night, so it appears this is now resolved.