I have looked for several reasons that could cause my problem without luck. The issue seems to be extremely particular: my server running LTS 10.04 is not correctly running scripts relating to internet usage. I am trying to update a dynamic dns from my server so that my domain will always point to my server. I ssh to my server to make changes and it's always running.
There are two places I've put the cron script:
1) Add a crontab using crontab -e for the current user
2) Add a file under /etc/cron.d/ (two different files too)
I made sure that they are owned by root and have access bits for the owner.
Ruling out a few things:
1) All cron scripts work perfectly on my laptop which is also 10.04 LTS
2) Both scripts run perfectly fine when run from the command line.
3) On the server if I concat "hello" to a file using cron every minute it actually works
The simpler of the two scripts to be run has configuration like this:
* * * * * root /usr/bin/wget "-q --read-timeout=0.0 --waitretry=5 --tries=10 --background http://freedns.afraid.org/dynamic/update.php?...........
Where I'm hiding the update key and it IS followed by a new line.
I feel like this must be something specific to cron that I'm missing out on.
I also do not have a cron log file in either /var or /var/log
Let me know if there is some information I forgot to mention.