(I figured this out, it was multiple problems...I'm leaving this as is and explain the process I took to resolve in my answer to this question)

I'm working on a simple Ruby script that runs as a cron job. I'm using Visual Studio Code and the Remote-Containers extension which makes it easy to spin up a Ruby dev environment which runs in a Docker container.

This Docker container is running Debian 10 (Buster). I have tested the script and it runs okay:

sudo /usr/local/bin/ruby /workspaces/main.rb

I've used crontab -e to add the cron jobs:

* * * * * /usr/local/bin/ruby /workspaces/main.rb
* * * * *  sleep 30; /usr/local/bin/ruby /workspaces/main.rb

At first there wasn't any syslog at all. So I installed rsyslog and logs started going into /var/log/syslog but there were only a few. Those relating to cron where all about edits I was making with crontab:

May 21 14:29:56 cec3901197dc crontab[3347]: (vscode) LIST (vscode)
May 21 14:30:00 cec3901197dc crontab[3362]: (vscode) BEGIN EDIT (vscode)

I edited /etc/rsyslog.conf and changed:

#cron.* /var/log/cron.log

to:

cron.* /var/log/cron.log

I then killed and restarted the rsyslogd process:

sudo kill -9 3056
sudo rsyslogd

I can send a test message to the syslog and see it is running:

logger test

Looking at /var/log/syslog I see the appropriate log entry has been added:

May 21 15:50:29 cec3901197dc vscode: test

I can also see that rsyslog is successfully writing crontab log entries to /var/log/cron.log:

May 21 15:44:15 cec3901197dc crontab[16490]: (vscode) BEGIN EDIT (vscode)
May 21 15:46:27 cec3901197dc crontab[16490]: (vscode) END EDIT (vscode)

But I'm only seeing these sort of crontab entries, nothing about the cron jobs executing. I'm guessing my jobs may be configured incorrectly...and I've tried a few different variations with none providing any log entries.

Still, even if they are configured incorrectly shouldn't cron still log the errors they produce to cron.log?

Is there something else I need to get more verbose messages from cron? Or is there something I can change about the commands that will provide more verbose messages?

Update - 5/21/21

I tried this on my local Ubuntu install. I had to login as root using sudo -i and add to the root's crontab. This worked - I began seeing the logs in my /var/log/ folder.

However, using root on my VSC container didn't work. Based on comparing the logging from my local Ubuntu and the VSC instance I suspect the issue is that syslog is now working fine and the issue is that the cron scheduler isn't actually running...that's why only crontab related entries are showing up in the syslog.

Why isn't cron running?

Answer: The Docker container doesn't start cron by default. Running cron from the prompt will start it running and it will begin logging correctly to /var/log/cron.log.

However, even with the cron job executing it still isn't creating the appropriate current_users or user_changes files at /var/log/.

Configuration Status Now

1. Still using VSC Remote Containers Ruby Docker container.
2. Installed and started rsyslogd.
3. Edit /etc/rsyslog.conf to redirect cron related logging to cron.log (from main syslog)
4. Kill and restart rsyslogd to ensure latest conf is picked up.
5. Use sudo -i to access root.
6. As root add crontab jobs using crontab -e:

* * * * * ruby /workspaces/main.rb
* * * * * sleep 30; ruby /workspaces/main.rb

1. Check that cron is actually running the jobs in cron.log:

May 21 18:41:01 cec3901197dc CRON[45188]: (root) CMD (sleep 30; ruby /workspaces/main.rb)
May 21 18:41:01 cec3901197dc CRON[45190]: (root) CMD (ruby /workspaces/main.rb)

1. Check to see if current_users or user_changes has been updated, nope.
2. Check that script can run correctly at command prompt ruby /workspaces/main.rb. Yup, runs just fine. Creates appropriate files.

So now I'm really confuzzled. The cron job is running the ruby script but it is not creating the files. I can run the ruby script myself and it does create the files. What gives?

Lets say we have John Doe as an employee at a company and he has been assigned an email address of [email protected].

A year later John leaves the company and his account becomes dormant. Another year after that we hire John Door and decide to give him the email address of [email protected].

We delete the old John Doe user and create the new John Door user.

Now Jane Doe needs to send an email to John Door so she fires up her browser and opens her email account in the same G Suite organization (her email is [email protected]). She begins to enter "John" into the TO field of the email she is composing and it auto-fills with "John Doe" not "John Door".

Fast forward a few days and G Suite has synced up the Contacts Directory with individual G Suite users and most individuals now see "John Door" when they begin entering [email protected], but some users are still seeing "John Doe".

Why is this? My assumption is that the individuals still seeing the old information have a contact in their local G Suite account with information about "John Doe" and that Google doesn't overwrite this contact with information from the Contact Directory.

Am I correct? Or is there another reason someone might continue to see the old contact information associated with the email address?

I have a Dell PE R520 with 18.1 TB drive (built on RAID 6, disk internal to server).

I setup Microsoft's Deduplication functionality on this drive and began moving large amounts of material onto it.

Now it shows that it has .75 TB free out of the 18.1 TB; but if I pull up the properties of each of the top-level folders on this drive they show 24.47 TB as the uncompressed file size and 4.66 as the actual (deduped) size on disk.

The 24.47 TB makes sense - since it is deduping it is able to squeeze more into less storage.

What doesn't make sense is why there is only .75 TB free if the deduped files are only consuming 4.66 TB.

What am I missing?

I am actually using MariaDB (drop-in replacement for MySQL).

I'm trying to make some changes to my systemd mysql.service file.

I can see it exists because running sudo systemctl lists it and indicates that it is loaded / active / running.

The issue is that I can't find the file to make edits. From what I've read in various articles I've found is that the doc should be located at

/etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/mysql.service

But it isn't. I've browsed through other directories at the /etc/systemd level to no avail. Any ideas?

I'm beginning to use Mandrill to send out transactional emails from my various domains. Now what I'd like is a way to receive these emails simply w/out setting up a mail server on my linux boxes. I'm wondering if there is a service like this? I use Google Apps for one of my domains, but this is no longer available as a free service AND Google Apps is way overkill for what I want to accomplish (usually, I just want to have the email address of that domain forwarded to another email address - e.g. I have the domain ocddave.com and want to forward emails sent to [email protected] to an email address at davemackey.net).

I'm consulting for a small business that has a single server that handles DC, DNS, DHCP, etc. roles. It is giving the following error with some regularity: 4013 DNS-Server-Service

The DNS server is waiting for Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) to signal that the initial synchronization of the directory has been completed. The DNS server service cannot start until the initial synchronization is complete because critical DNS data might not yet be replicated onto this domain controller. If events in the AD DS event log indicate that there is a problem with DNS name resolution, consider adding the IP address of another DNS server for this domain to the DNS server list in the Internet Protocol properties of this computer. This event will be logged every two minutes until AD DS has signaled that the initial synchronization has successfully completed.

Any ideas on why?

I have some files on a network share and they were read-only accessible to users. I had set the permissions to provide full rights to all domain users - when I checked the main folder, this was still set, but at deeper levels it was sent to read-only. When I right-clicked on the child folder it told me that the permissions where improperly ordered and then allowed me to reorder them. How does this happen?

I recently upgraded a small company's computers. The new computers did not have parallel port cards so I bought a few parallel to USB adapters. These work fine on the local workstation, but if I then share the workstation and another workstation attempts to print via this printer, it doesn't see/use the printer fonts. Is there a way to correct this other than getting a parallel port card or replacing the printer with a newer model?

I just upgraded to the latest Ubuntu release on a VPS. When it finished the permalinks no longer worked.

My .htaccess file looks like:

 # BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
     RewriteEngine On
     RewriteBase /
     RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
     RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
     RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
     RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
 </IfModule>

 # END WordPress

My virtual host file looks like:

 <VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName www.nameofsite.org
    DocumentRoot /var/www/wordpress
 </VirtualHost>
 <VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName nameofsite.org
    Redirect permanent / http://www.nameofsite.org/
 </VirtualHost>
 <Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
 </Directory>

At our church we have a small network. It consists of a Verizon FiOS router, several Open-Mesh OM2P-HS wireless units that relay the signal to various locations around the church. One of these OM2P-HS units has a NetGear GS108 plugged into it. Into this GS108 is plugged two printers (Dell 2355dn and 2150cn) and a Cisco SPA504G phone. There is one other permanently connected workstation in another room and then a number of roaming units (laptops).

On occasion when one goes to print to the printers they show as "offline." Rebooting the printers doesn't fix the problem. Sometimes it is across all computers, sometimes it is on just one computer - right now my laptop can't print but the workstation in the office can.

From my laptop I can ping and visit the web management interface for the printers, but when I have Windows Troubleshooting try to figure out the problem it reports, "Printer is turned off. The printer needs to be turned on in order to print."

I also tried rebooting my laptop, but it still cannot print to the devices and sees them as offline.

Any ideas on why this occurs and how to fix it?

I'm running top and I see that out of 502968 KB, 48064 KB is used leaving 16884 KB free. But then when I look at the individual processes I see that mysql is consuming 9.4% of my RAM on occasion - but nothing else seems to be consuming anything. What is consuming all my RAM?

Here is a screen capture from top:

top - 20:46:07 up 1 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.18, 0.05, 0.02
Tasks:  81 total,   1 running,  80 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  0.0 us,  0.4 sy,  0.0 ni, 99.6 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:    502968 total,   241236 used,   261732 free,    10488 buffers
KiB Swap:   524284 total,        0 used,   524284 free,   106756 cached

PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S  %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
1584 dmackey   20   0 20508 1372 1000 R   0.4  0.3   0:00.01 top
1 root      20   0 26664 2456 1340 S   0.0  0.5   0:00.69 init
2 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd
3 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.01 ksoftirqd/0
4 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/0:0
5 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/0:0H
6 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/u:0
7 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/u:0H
8 root      rt   0     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0
9 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 rcu_bh
10 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.24 rcu_sched
11 root      rt   0     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0
12 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 cpuset
13 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 khelper
14 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kdevtmpfs
15 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 netns
16 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 bdi-default

And here is one from free:

            total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        502968     355252     147716          0      10816     111548
-/+ buffers/cache:     232888     270080
Swap:       524284          0     524284

I've installed a new Dell PowerEdge R720 server at a small company which eight workstations. It is running Windows Server 2012 Standard. I've then installed Hyper-V (role) onto the server and created a virtual instance also running 2012 Standard.

An older PE 2950 server is also running (Windows Server 2003). It serves as the Domain Controller, DNS, DHCP, and runs Systech's software for dispatching/mixing. Everything works okay when the Windows XP clients access the software via the PE 2950.

Last night Integra installed the upgraded server software onto the virtualized 2012 instance and we then installed the client on one of the Windows XP machines - the updated client runs dreadfully slow (takes literally 1-2 minutes for each interaction).

We have new Windows 7 machines to replace the Windows XP machines, so we booted up two of them and install the client on them and tried utilizing the new server - both ran dreadfully slow.

It seems also that the new server may have issues with dropping connections. While Integra was logged in remotely they would be occasionally disconnected.

Other symptoms:

1. File transfer from old server to new server was extremely slow.
2. File transfer from new server to workstations is extremely slow.
3. Downloading large files from the internet to new server oftentimes resulted in corrupted (broken) downloads.
4. Using Wireshark I can see the client machine requesting the application file from the server - and doing so over and over again, as if the request is not acknowledged.

Other system info:

1. The network is running a new Dell PowerConnect 2824 switch, all cabling is Cat 5e.
2. I swapped network cables out between the new server and the switch.
3. There are no appreciable errors appearing on any of the switch ports via the PowerConnect web interface.
4. I switched the port the server was plugged into on the PowerConnect 2824.

I suspect that this is a setting related to SMB or TCP/IP offload, etc. but have been unable to find anything that makes a difference thus far...Any ideas?

I have a Windows Server 2008 SP 2 Standard domain controller. Attempting to enable RDP on workstations throughout the network using Group Policy. Everything I see says to go to Computer Configuration-->Policies-->Windows Components-->Remote Desktop Services. But when I open up Group Policy using GPME, there is no Remote Desktop Services folder. Thoughts?

I ran YUM on a server running BestPractical's RT. Now Apache won't start. Looking at the error log I get this error:

File::Temp version 0.18 required--this is only version 0.16 at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/MIME/Tools.pm line 14.

I ran CPAN and did install File::Temp and it says it already has the latest version (0.22). Why is it giving me this error?

So, Exchange Servers just grow and grow. One option is to use archival software to move emails, etc. out of the server...but recently I thought, "Why move the emails out at all?" If one could remove the file attachments the store wouldn't increase in size nearly as much...and theoretically, it would be possible to link to the files on the filesystem in the email, so the user experience would be the same. I was wondering if such a solution was already in existence?

We purchase some of our systems (desktops mainly) through a small third-party OEM. They don't include serial number, manufacturer info., etc. in the BIOS however and this makes it difficult for systems monitoring and inventorying software to distinguish one system from another - especially if we do a clean wipe on the system. MAC addresses are semi-reliable, but not truly unique. I'd like to add some info. - such as manufacturer and serial number / asset tag into the bios (there are fields for it), but I can't edit it through the normal BIOS menu. Any idea on how this can be accomplished?

I've install SCCM 2012 on a server and have successfully used the Remote Control option to take control of a system I've setup to be managed by SCCM. Now, I don't want to have to log in to a server every time I want to access this client...is there a way to run the Remote Control Viewer client on my desktop OS so I can take remote control of systems rather than having to remote in from the server? This seems like very basic functionality...but I haven't been able to figure it out thus far.

So, I've been using some port mapping software and running into a problem. We have many switches spread across the network, when I do a network scan it shows the device that is physically connected to a port, and in the case of a switch, all the devices that are connected to that switch and potentially all the devices that are connected to a port on that switch which is a switch and so on ad infinitum. What I'd like to do is figure out a way to determine exactly what is physically connected to each port. I don't need to know all the devices downstream - just that this physical device is connected to this port...and then if that device happens to be a switch, what devices are physically connected to that switch and so on. Any ideas?

I currently have a Linux server running ISC DHCPd and I'd like to eliminate this server and move to a Windows DHCP server. I'm wondering if there is an easy way to accomplish this or if someone could recommend some best practices?

I'm just wondering how folks handle ongoing file system stability when using a Windows Server as a file server without taking the system offline to perform chkdsk /f or chkdsk /r? Obviously, one doesn't really want a file server to be unavailable...and file servers now have so much storage that it could take days to run a chkdsk...so how are you protecting data from corruption?