17.7 Troubleshooting

There are several possibilities if a scheduled cron job apepars to be running but isn’t producing the expected results. The following are suggestions on what to try to resolve the issue.

17.7.1 Username and password

The user that scheduled a cron job may not have access permissions to the database. This can be easily confirmed by running the command line from the cron job while logged in as the user that scheduled the job. An error message will be shown if the user doesn’t have permissions.

To resolve this, be sure to include a valid database user (not a BETYdb user) with their credentials on the command in crontab.

17.7.2 db_hba.conf file

Iit’s possible that the machine hosting the docker image of the database doesn’t have permissions to access the database. This may due to the cron job running on a machine that is not the docker instance of the database.

It may be necessary to look at the loga on the hosting machine to determine if database access permissions are causing a problem. Logs are stored in different locations depending upon the Operating System of the host and upon other environmental factors. This document doesn’t provide information on where to find the logs.

To begin, it’s best to look at the contents of the relevent database configuration file. The following command will display the contents of the db_hba.conf file.

psql -U postgres -qAt -c "show hba_file" | xargs grep -v -E '^[[:space:]]*#'

This command should return a series of text lines. For each row except those begining with ‘local’, the fourth item describes the machines that can access the database. In some cases an IP mask is specified in the fifth that further restricts the machines that have access. The special work ‘all’ in the fourth column grants permissions to all machines. The last column on each line contains the authentication option for the machine(s) specified in the fourth column (with a possible fifth column IP mask modifier).

Ensure that the host machine is listed under the fourth column (machine addresse range, or ‘all’), is also included in the IP mask if one was specified, and finally that any authentication option are not set to ‘reject’. If the host machine is not included the db_hba.conf file will need to be updated to allow access.