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POWhy Doesn't My Cron Job Work Properly?
 

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  1. POWhy Doesn't My Cron Job Work Properly?
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    <p>I have a cron job on an Ubuntu Hardy VPS that only half works and I can't work out why. The job is a Ruby script that uses mysqldump to back up a MySQL database used by a Rails application, which is then gzipped and uploaded to a remote server using SFTP.</p> <p>The gzip file is created and copied successfully but it's always zero bytes. Yet if I run the cron command directly from the command line it works perfectly.</p> <p>This is the cron job:</p> <pre><code>PATH=/usr/bin 10 3 * * * ruby /home/deploy/bin/datadump.rb </code></pre> <p>This is datadump.rb:</p> <pre><code>#!/usr/bin/ruby require 'yaml' require 'logger' require 'rubygems' require 'net/ssh' require 'net/sftp' APP = '/home/deploy/apps/myapp/current' LOGFILE = '/home/deploy/log/data.log' TIMESTAMP = '%Y%m%d-%H%M' TABLES = 'table1 table2' log = Logger.new(LOGFILE, 5, 10 * 1024) dump = "myapp-#{Time.now.strftime(TIMESTAMP)}.sql.gz" ftpconfig = YAML::load(open('/home/deploy/apps/myapp/shared/config/sftp.yml')) config = YAML::load(open(APP + '/config/database.yml'))['production'] cmd = "mysqldump -u #{config['username']} -p#{config['password']} -h #{config['host']} --add-drop-table --add-locks --extended-insert --lock-tables #{config['database']} #{TABLES} | gzip -cf9 &gt; #{dump}" log.info 'Getting ready to create a backup' `#{cmd}` # Strongspace log.info 'Backup created, starting the transfer to Strongspace' Net::SSH.start(ftpconfig['strongspace']['host'], ftpconfig['strongspace']['username'], ftpconfig['strongspace']['password']) do |ssh| ssh.sftp.connect do |sftp| sftp.open_handle("#{ftpconfig['strongspace']['dir']}/#{dump}", 'w') do |handle| sftp.write(handle, open("#{dump}").read) end end end log.info 'Finished transferring backup to Strongspace' log.info 'Removing local file' cmd = "rm -f #{dump}" log.debug "Executing: #{cmd}" `#{cmd}` log.info 'Local file removed' </code></pre> <p>I've checked and double-checked all the paths and they're correct. Both <strong>sftp.yml</strong> (SFTP credentials) and <strong>database.yml</strong> (MySQL credentials) are owned by the executing user (deploy) with read-only permissions for that user (chmod 400). I'm using the 1.1.x versions of net-ssh and net-sftp. I know they're not the latest, but they're what I'm familiar with at the moment.</p> <p>What could be causing the cron job to fail?</p>
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