Cron service in maintenance mode

Question

Hi Experts,
I need an advice how to bring cron service online. It's in maintenance mode all the time and when I try to enable it, I'm keep getting below errors in log file, and service stays in maintenance mode:
[ Apr 22 07:58:48 Stopping because all processes in service exited. ]
[ Apr 22 07:58:48 Executing stop method (:kill) ]
[ Apr 22 07:58:48 Executing start method ("/lib/svc/method/svc-cron") ]
[ Apr 22 07:58:48 Method "start" exited with status 0 ]
cron could not unlink FIFO: No such file or directory
! cannot create fifo queue Mon Apr 22 07:58:48 2013
! ******* CRON ABORTED ******** Mon Apr 22 07:58:48 2013
[ Apr 22 07:58:48 Stopping because all processes in service exited. ]
[ Apr 22 07:58:48 Executing stop method (:kill) ]
[ Apr 22 07:58:48 Restarting too quickly, changing state to maintenance ]
I was searching for that errors and I found that this may be caused by missing FIFO file in /etc/cron.d directory but when I tried to make it by mknod i get this error:
/usr/sbin/mknod /var/adm/cron/FIFO p
mknod: No such device
I'm not even sure if this is correct direction of root cause but I'm stuck at this point and need your help. If anybody experienced such issue, please advice.
System details:
uname -a
SunOS lspz1215 5.10 Generic_147440-01 sun4v sparc SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T5220
Regards,
Wojciech

Answer 1

Hi,
Check that below files exist and have correct permissions:
root@sol10vm#cd /etc/cron.d/
root@sol10vm#ls
FIFO at.deny cron.deny queuedefs
root@sol10vm#ls -ltr
total 6
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 17 Jan 22 2005 queuedefs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 40 Jan 11 21:35 cron.deny
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 40 Jan 11 21:35 at.deny
prw------- 1 root root 0 Apr 22 13:04 FIFO
root@sol10vm#file FIFO
FIFO: fifo
root@sol10vm#pwd
/etc/cron.d
root@sol10vm#ls -ld /etc/cron.d
drwxr-xr-x 2 root sys 512 Apr 22 13:04 /etc/cron.d
root@sol10vm#
after you correct them, issue 'svcadm -v clear cron'
Regards,
Rei