Doing a bare install of CentOS 5.3, I noticed that all the cron folders were created, but that cron jobs were not firing. Searching the web, I found a few people with the same problem, but no one seemed to have a fix, until now.

 

[root@somebox etc]# ll | grep -i "cron"
-rw-r--r--  1 root   root      298 Mar 27  2007 anacrontab
drwx------  2 root   root     4096 Aug 30 23:09 cron.d
drwxr-xr-x  2 root   root     4096 Jul  2 20:35 cron.daily
-rw-r--r--  1 root   root        0 Apr  9  2008 cron.deny
drwxr-xr-x  2 root   root     4096 Jan  6  2007 cron.hourly
drwxr-xr-x  2 root   root     4096 Apr  9  2008 cron.monthly
-rw-r--r--  1 root   root      255 Jan  6  2007 crontab
drwxr-xr-x  2 root   root     4096 Apr  9  2008 cron.weekly

 

[root@somebox ~]# yum info vixie-cron
Installed Packages
Name       : vixie-cron
Arch       : i386
Epoch      : 4
Version    : 4.1
Release    : 76.el5
Size       : 619 k
Repo       : installed
Summary    : The Vixie cron daemon for executing specified programs at set
           : times.
License    : distributable
Description: The vixie-cron package contains the Vixie version of cron.  Cron is
           : a standard UNIX daemon that runs specified programs at scheduled
           : times. Vixie cron adds better security and more powerful
           : configuration options to the standard version of cron.

 

[root@somebox ~]# yum install vixie-cron