Cron stopped working after end of September

[spadija]

I have a cron job set to email me a backup of my site's database every night, and it was working perfectly until October 1. The last email I received was on September 30 and my inbox still has a good 7.4GB of free space.

My site is chaosinacan.com (or chaosinacan.x10hosting.com) and is running on Starka. Is there a reason why cron stopped working, and more importantly, can it be fixed?

 

[stpvoice]

Some other users are reporting problems with cron on starka at the moment. I'm sure admin are looking into it.

 

[spadija]

Alright. Thanks!

 

[descalzo]

Can you call the script from the Web? And if so, does it work?

Trying to narrow the problem between cron, email, and the backup script.

 

[spadija]

The script is a .sh file, so I don't think I can call it from the web.

This is the script (minus personal data) which worked up until October.

DBNAME=spadija_<database>
DBPASS=<my password>
DBUSER=spadija_root
EMAIL="<my gmail>"
SUBJECT="Chaos in a Can Backup"
DATE=$(date +%m-%d-%Y)
mysqldump -ce --user=$DBUSER --password=$DBPASS $DBNAME | gzip | uuencode backup-$DATE.sql.gz | mail -s "$SUBJECT" $EMAIL

I can send email to the same address from my site via PHP. I'm also not getting any email notifications saying the cron failed. (Things like "mysqldump: Got error: 2002: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2) when trying to connect")

 

[descalzo]

Should be fixed now.

Email notification of crons should be turned off (was flooding the email server when tons of people have 5 min crons).

Cron job code like:

/usr/bin/php /home/igor/public_html/mycronjob.php  >> /home/igor/public_html/cronlog.txt  2>&1

will give you a log which includes errors and any stdout output of your script.

 

[spadija]

Alright. It's working again.

Is there a way to write an equivalent script in PHP? Since PHP's mail function works, that would make my script no longer dependent on email notification, but I have no idea how to do something like mysqldump from PHP, since I'm going to assume system() is probably blocked to keep it from being abused.

Thanks!