I'm concerned that cron jobs can fail silently for an indefinite period of time on vanilla Ubuntu Desktop 12.04.1 (Precise), and no one will notice. I would like to get a notification whenever a system cron job prints some output or just fails.
I know it is possible to install a mail server (e.g. postfix), configure it for local-only delivery, set up an alias so that root's mail is delivered to my normal user account and configure a mail client to check my local mailbox.
Are there any lightweight alternatives to this solution in Ubuntu?
You could redirect the error output of your cronjob command to a file. Here is an example of a line in /etc/crontab:
01 3 * * * user /bin/command 2>> /var/log/some.file
Then at least you got a clue if errors occured. You might even write a script to notify you over notify-osd or similar tools when the file changes.
The file /var/log/syslog reports messages from cron as well. You might want to take a look at that. To get a dedicated log-file for the cron deamon edit /etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf and uncomment/edit the line that says:
#cron.* /var/log/cron.log
Don't know what you'll find there but worth the try. Report how it went.
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