FreeBSD 15 Syslog Flood From Repeating Cron Job Errors

📖 ~1 min read

Table of contents

1. Symptom & Impact
2. Environment & Reproduction
3. Root Cause Analysis
4. Quick Triage
5. Step-by-Step Diagnosis
6. Solution – Primary Fix
7. Solution – Alternative Approaches
8. Verification & Acceptance Criteria
9. Rollback Plan
10. Prevention & Hardening
11. Related Errors & Cross-Refs
12. References & Further Reading

Symptom & Impact

Log volume spikes, hiding important events and increasing storage usage.

Environment & Reproduction

A misconfigured cron command fails every minute.

sudo crontab -l

Root Cause Analysis

Broken command path, missing environment variable, or permission mismatch in cron context.

Quick Triage

Identify top repeating error signatures in recent logs.

sudo grep -i cron /var/log/messages | tail -n 200

Step-by-Step Diagnosis

Run failing command with cron-like environment to reproduce.

env -i /bin/sh -c ''

Solution – Primary Fix

Correct command, set full paths, and validate execution manually.

sudo crontab -e

Solution – Alternative Approaches

Temporarily disable job and add alerting while root cause is addressed.

Verification & Acceptance Criteria

Error signature ceases and log ingestion returns to baseline.

Rollback Plan

Restore previous cron entry if corrected job introduces side effects.

Prevention & Hardening

Standardize cron wrappers with logging and exit-code monitoring.

Related Errors & Cross-Refs

Can trigger log rotation churn and rsyslog forwarding backpressure.

Related tutorial: View the step-by-step tutorial for freebsd-15.

View all freebsd-15 tutorials on the Tutorials Hub →

Browse all common problems & solutions on the Tutorials Hub.

References & Further Reading

cron(8) and FreeBSD logging practices.