Re: cron & backup

On Tue, 18 Jan 2005 11:12:34 +0100, v(dot)demartino2(at)virgilio(dot)it
<v(dot)demartino2(at)virgilio(dot)it> wrote:
> At office we have a Win2k LAN to which my freebsd postgresql server box
> is connected via Samba. On this box I have a script, called 'crono', which
> is dealt by /usr/bin/cron every working day's night at 1 am. As you can
> see below this crono script vacuums all the DBs and dumps mydb to a samba
> share.
>
> ##crono file
> vacuumdb -a -U victor
> pg_dump --create --format=c -O -Uvictor --file=/root/my_dump/mydb.sql.gz
> mydb
> ##
>
> Now if I execute the script by hand as root it all works smoothly but cron
> fails frequently to start or complete the execution of the script even though
> in the cron log I see that it starts it regularly as root at 1 am.
>
> The fact is that I don't have any other clue on what is going wrong because
> of the poor log.
>
> What logs shoiuld I enable in the postgresql.conf configuration file to
> trace what's going on with the vacuumdb and pg_dump commands?

Normally cronjob output is sent to the email address of its owner. Is
root receiving any email output from this cronjob? Also, you should
add the -z and -f switches to vacuumdb.

If I had to guess on your probem above, i'd say it could be a $PATH
issue, since you're not specifying the path for vacuumdb.

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