Anything Cron is broken after restart

[Ryan Beall]

I have had this issue for 8 months now on multiple versions of the firmware.

Basically if I restart the server for any reason, nothing cron driven works as expected (tasks, smart, scrubs). Usually in the past I always would "service cron restart" and it would bring everything back into working order. But it's getting annoying chasing this down every time. I tried the "service cron restart" workaround this morning and it isn't working. I've submitted a bug report on this issue earlier and basically got "cannot not duplicate" I was hoping on firmware updates it would go away but it's still affecting my system after 4 or 5 updates later? Anyone got any out of the box ideas that would cause cron to not work after restarts that would also not be affected by updates?

On a side note, I also have a random few jails that won't auto start on restart and I have to go into command line and square everything out. I think this might just be rough carry overs from earlier 9.1 or 9.2 stuff that has migrated forward on my system. I've been hesitant to start from scratch because I'm not familiar with how successful my custom Pydio and Plex jails will turn out afterwards. Are jails stored on the pool or on usb stick? If I do a clean restore (to hopefully fix these problems for good) will I get everything back on my jails as is if all I use is the config backup file?

 

[Nick2253]

Have you tried backing up your config, and doing a fresh install of FreeNAS?

That has helped quite a few people with random issues. Most likely, it's something to do with a corrupt file on the USB boot stick.

The fresh install does nothing to your data. As long as you have the config file, everything will be back as is. Nothing lives on the USB stick other than the FreeNAS OS and the config file.

Just to assuage any lingering worries: as long as you have your config backup, you can completely destroy your USB stick without consequence. If you lose your config backup, you will not lose any data; you will just have to set everything back up again. Even your jails' data will be preserved, you just have to do some config/import steps.

 

[Ryan Beall]

Awesome, I thought that was the case but I feel a whole lot more confident in getting in and wiping everything. Will do a clean install tonight then! Thanks! Hopefully that will fix the random issues.