Having installed the latest version of the vixie-cron RPM (version
4.1-10.EL3.i386) on many of our SL 303 systems, we find error messages
in the /var/log/cron like these:

Mar 27 13:03:10 pat crond[20027]: (root) error: Job execution of
per-minute job scheduled for 13:00 delayed into subsequent minute 13:03.
Skipping job run.
Mar 27 13:03:10 pat crond[20026]: (root) error: Job execution of
per-minute job scheduled for 13:00 delayed into subsequent minute 13:03.
Skipping job run.
Mar 27 13:43:10 pat crond[20557]: (root) error: Job execution of
per-minute job scheduled for 13:40 delayed into subsequent minute 13:43.
Skipping job run.
Mar 27 13:43:10 pat crond[20556]: (root) error: Job execution of
per-minute job scheduled for 13:40 delayed into subsequent minute 13:43.
Skipping job run.
Mar 27 14:11:34 pat crond[20901]: (root) error: Job execution of
per-minute job scheduled for 14:10 delayed into subsequent minute 14:11.
Skipping job run.
Mar 28 07:51:34 pat crond[2273]: (root) error: Job execution of
per-minute job scheduled for 07:50 delayed into subsequent minute 07:51.
Skipping job run.
Mar 28 07:51:34 pat crond[2272]: (root) error: Job execution of
per-minute job scheduled for 07:50 delayed into subsequent minute 07:51.
Skipping job run.

The cron jobs referred to (there are 2 separate jobs) run every 5 and 15
minutes.  As these jobs are a heartbeat script and a system monitoring
script we need them to run reliably and so we have had to back out the
RPM.  Note that most of the time the cron jobs run, but either or both
of them may be suppressed.  Has anyone else seen this problem ?  If so,
is there a fix ?  Is it a configuration fault ?  If so, is there any
documentation for the configuration file (/etc/sysconfig/crond) ?

Jonathan Wheeler
Tier1A Service Team
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory