On 3/11/2020 11:53 PM, Ram Ramesh wrote:

This may be a silly question, but is email working in your system?

     It's not a silly question, but I believe I already answered it.  
Yes, email is working, and yes, mdadm is able to send messages.  It 
complains every morning at 07:35 if one f the arrays is degraded, and 
the test function works.

I run debian, but a different version. Cron only sends me a message 
when something is wrong. I mean if checkarray failed, I get a message. 
If my array is degraded, I get a message. If everything is fine, no 
message. May be that is the standard. I am not the authority, but that 
is what is happening in my system.

     I don't believe cron sends the messages for the array redundancy 
check, since they are sent roughly every 20% of the sync task, not on 
any particular time schedule.  Of course, the status check is run by 
some timer, and cron could certainly handle such a task on a 
minute-by-minute basis, but I don't see any cron task related to the 
array structure other than /etc/cron.d/mdadm, which is the checkarray 
task itself, run once a month.

I believe cron emails stdout+stderr of the command run. May be 
checkarray does not output anything in a successful run and therefore 
no email.

     Checkarray normally doesn't output anything when run fro, the cron 
task, which employs the --quiet switch, nor does cron if checkarray is 
successful.  It merely initiates the check action on every specified 
array and exits.  Something else - presumably mdadm - sends an email as 
the array check proceeds every 20%.

It is best to also query debian.user email: debian-user@lists.debian.org

         I will try querying the Debian list, but while the cron job was 
a Debian feature, I don't believe this issue is one with Debian, per se.

Ramesh

On 3/11/20 8:41 PM, Leslie Rhorer wrote:

quoted

    Aha! There it is, on both the old and new systems, so it probably 
is running.  The question remains, "Why isn't it posting to email?"

On 3/11/2020 7:50 AM, Brad Campbell wrote:

quoted

On 11/3/20 09:11, Leslie Rhorer wrote:

quoted

     Is there seriously no one here who knows how checkarray was 
launched in previous versions?

On 3/1/2020 3:03 PM, Leslie Rhorer wrote:

quoted

    I have upgraded 2 of my servers to Debian Buster, and now 
neither one seems to be running checkarray automatically.  In 
addition, when I run checkarray manually, it isn't sending update 
emails on the status of the job.  Actually, I have never been able 
to figure out how checkarray runs.  One my older servers, there 
doesn't seem to be anything in /etc/crontab, /etc/cron.monthly, 
/etc/init.d/, /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf, or /lib/systemd/system/ that 
would run checkarray.

On mine it's in /etc/cron.d/mdadm

brad@srv:/etc/cron.d$ cat mdadm
#
# cron.d/mdadm -- schedules periodic redundancy checks of MD devices
#
# Copyright © martin f. krafft [off-list ref]
# distributed under the terms of the Artistic Licence 2.0
#

# By default, run at 00:57 on every Sunday, but do nothing unless 
the day of
# the month is less than or equal to 7. Thus, only run on the first 
Sunday of
# each month. crontab(5) sucks, unfortunately, in this regard; 
therefore this
# hack (see #380425).
57 0 * * 0 root if [ -x /usr/share/mdadm/checkarray ] && [ $(date 
+\%d) -le 7 ]; then /usr/share/mdadm/checkarray --cron --all --idle 
--quiet; fi

dpkg -L mdadm gave me a list of files and I just checked the cron 
entries.

I don't run anything that recent, but Debian is Debian.

Brad