Cron job runs but has no effect

[CypherBYTE]

I am trying to set up an automatic backup for a MySQL database. CentOS 7.

I have a command I can run in SSH that works fine:

sudo mysqldump -u MySQLUser -pPASSWORD dbname | gzip > Admin/ers_`date '+%Y%m%d-%H%M'`.sql.gz

I have setup a cron job and it appears to be executed in the cron logs, with no indication of errors, BUT it does appear to be truncated:

May 26 03:39:40 vps crontab[31363]: (root) LIST (admin)
May 26 03:40:01 vps CROND[31388]: (admin) CMD (sudo mysqldump -u admin_ers -pPASSWORD admin_ers | gzip > Admin/ers_`date '+)
May 26 03:40:01 vps CROND[31390]: (root) CMD (/usr/local/directadmin/dataskq)
May 26 03:40:20 vps crontab[31394]: (root) LIST (admin)
May 26 03:41:01 vps CROND[417]: (root) CMD (/usr/local/directadmin/dataskq)
May 26 03:42:01 vps CROND[474]: (root) CMD (/usr/local/directadmin/dataskq)

Yet, still nothing happens.

I have tried giving full rwx rights (777) to the Admin folder, adding the admin user to the wheel group, even tried un-remming this line in the sudoers file:

%wheel    ALL=(ALL)      NOPASSWD: ALL

Any ideas what I might be missing?

 

[Zhenyapan]

You can use admin backup and customize it to backup mysql only.

 

[CypherBYTE]

Thanks, but I'd really like to be able to specify which database to backup. I also want to find out why it isn't working now ... for the sake of sanity!

 

[Zhenyapan]

in such case - try to use da_admin or root (mysql) credentials to backup databases, or you want to use for each database it's own credentials?

 

[CypherBYTE]

Ok, I will reconfigure it to use the root user. I was trying to avoid that.

I really don't understand why the cron won't run the command but I can run the command directly. Might it have something to do with the way the logs seem to have truncated the command?

 

[Zhenyapan]

You may put command to bash script and run it with cron, also try to add user before command, like:
1 5 * * * root mysqldump -u MySQLUser -pPASSWORD dbname | gzip > Admin/ers_`date '+%Y%m%d-%H%M'`.sql.gz

 

[CypherBYTE]

Thank you, I will try these things as soon as I can.

 

[floyd]

Why do you have sudo in the command? And you may need to have the full path to mysqldump in the command.

 

[CypherBYTE]

You may put command to bash script and run it with cron

This got it running as desired. As soon as I put the command in a bash script, it started working. Thank you!

Why do you have sudo in the command?

The sudo is there because I am VERY new to VPS and UNIX and it's part of the trials / attempts I made to try to get the cron to run.

And you may need to have the full path to mysqldump in the command.

Thankfully I didn't because I wouldn't know where it is!