I got cron working again on R066. Here is what I found:
The status for cron in the web admin for OpenWRT (
Advanced => OpenWRT => System => Startup) shows it enabled, but running a ps command from the shell clearly showed that the cron daemon was actually NOT running.
Lars is right in the sense that
crond, the executable, works fine. (Starting it manually got it going.) Once I discovered that, it was pretty clear that the culprit was the startup script. When I stepped through the lines of the script (the one that tries to bring it up at boot time is at
/etc/rc.d/S50cron), it eventually became clear that the script is making reference to some PROCD framework that does not exist in the rest of the current Almond+ firmware (based upon OpenWRT's old Kamikaze release, I think). The script gets as far as line 20, where the call to
/sbin/validate_data silently fails because there is no such executable on the Almond+ in firmware R066.
Since OpenWRT is conveniently open, I headed over to their source repository. The startup script in the Almond+ appears to have been pulled straight from trunk:
https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/trunk/package/utils/busybox/files/cron . In order to find something that would work, I looked back through the revision history to find a file that might have been more contemporary to the rest of the firmware. I stopped digging when I found this one:
https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/tags/8.09_rc2/package/busybox/files/cron?rev=14166, which gets cron working again.
If you replace your
/etc/rc.d/S50cron file from R066 with the OpenWRT v8.09_rc2 script above and execute the following at the command line:
/etc/rc.d/S50cron restart
you should find your cron will start running again.
This is obviously not a permanent fix but I've found it a handy workaround. Hopefully it also helps the team at Securifi sort out what they need to do to make cron start properly in a future firmware release.