I set up a new machine a couple of months ago, and for some time I've been getting an email each day:
Subject: Cron <root@host> test -x /usr/sbin/run-crons && /usr/sbin/run-crons fopen: Permission denied Taking a look at /etc/cron.daily/ shows only one odd one out: $ sudo ls -lh /etc/cron.daily/ total 16K -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 180 Feb 4 20:28 logrotate -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 196 Mar 3 09:48 man-db -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 141 Apr 16 14:09 mcelog -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1.3K Feb 4 23:53 mlocate I *assume* that mcelog is the cron job which is causing this error, although the error message is not much to go on. It doesn't have execute permissions set, though, so that's what leads me towards this (tentative) conclusion. I dunno, running it manually gives a different error: $ sudo /etc/cron.daily/mcelog sudo: /etc/cron.daily/mcelog: command not found $ Nevertheless, when I look at the http://mcelog.org/ homepage, specified in the package description, it says: Traditionally mcelog was run as a cronjob, but this usage is deprecated now. The modern way to run it is to start it at boot up time and run it always as a daemon. I tried unmerging app-admin/mcelog and the cron.daily file is removed; then remerging (the latest stable version - 1.0_pre3_p20130621-r1) and it's reinstalled with the same permissions. So I guess my question is: is this a bug with the app-admin/mcelog package? I've got another system which isn't showing this problem, and mcelog is not installed. And the system *seems* to be running just fine, despite the assertion at mcelog.or that "mcelog is required by … Linux kernels … to log machine checks and should run on all Linux systems that need error handling." On the system which is showing this problem, app-admin/mcelog is in the world file - and it was before I started investigating this problem (I know this because I have a clone of that system which I took a few weeks ago), although I don't recall ever choosing to install it. What is mcelog, and why do I need it, please? Stroller.
