Crontab is not working for oracle user suddenly

Hello DBA's,

Just wanted to share my simple mistake made crontab to skip all the jobs under oracle user. Here i have written the issue detail. This will help for those who work in solaris platform.
Kindly go through!

Just i figured out rman backup dint run for past two days in production. I immediately checked the permission for the scripts and mount point space to see we have sufficient space. Everything was fine.

At initial level i could not figure out the cause. I could not figure out anything after looking into logs.

You can check crontab logs in /var/cron/log for crontab jobs log. This is what i could see for the failed attempts.

>  oracle 9575 c Mon Feb 20 10:00:00 2017
! bad user (oracle) Mon Feb 20 10:00:00 2017
<  oracle 9575 c Mon Feb 20 10:00:00 2017 rc=1
>  CMD: sh /u02/backup/scripts/rman_full.sh

After digging into solaris forums i though this error "! bad user (oracle) Mon Feb 20 10:00:00 2017" could cause this issue. Few experts were posted as this error will trip due to account lock. So i check the account expiry date for oracle.

Use the below command :

logins -ax -l oracle

I made the oracle user as non-expire account but dint work. Use the command below to make any user to have no expiry date.

passwd -x -1 oracle

I checked whether cron services are running and it was also running fine,

svcs -a | grep cron

I add the below test job to trouble shoot the issue. This will run every one minute.

*   *  *  *   *  echo test >> /tmp/test.log

Also i check whether oracle user is locked but it was unlocked. you can check this in /etc/passwd. In case if its locked you can unlock by simply resetting the password for oracle user.

! bad user (oracle) Mon Feb 20 10:00:00 2017 --> This error can be fixed by just resetting the password but in case there is no issue with oracle user. so i still had to troubleshoot.

Finally i checked whether host entries are fine and found out -i have been set to hostname. This is due to wrong command entered accidentally to find ip address. hostname -i will not work in solaris like it does in linux. whatever we enter followed by hostname command will be set as hostname in solaris. so i did :

hostname <hostname> as root user.

After this my jobs were started running as usual. Hope this helps!