Urchin Q and A: Task Scheduler Disabled Error

Question:

I'm getting the error 'Warning, Task Scheduler Disabled' when trying to process my log files.

Answer:

There are 2 daemons, urchind and urchinwebd”, that need to be running in order for log processing, reporting, and configuration administration to occur. The Urchin scheduler (urchind) runs the Urchin processing executable which processes the log data and inserts it into the Urchin database. Urchin cannot process log data if the Urchin scheduler is not running. If Urchin can not process the logs it displays the “Warning, Task Scheduler Disabled” error message. Some of the most common reasons for this error message are:

1. The Urchin scheduler service is not running. This usually happens when the server is rebooted and Urchin is not included in the system’s start up scripts.

2. On Unix systems, the urchind service is running but it is owned by a different user than that which owns the Urchin distribution.

The first step in troubleshooting this problem is to determine if the urchind service is up and running on your server. Urchin offers an Apache like control command that can display the status of Urchin. Navigate to the bin directory within your Urchin installation (usually /usr/local/urchin) and type:

urchinctl status

You should see a two line response:

1. Urchin webserver is running

2. Urchin scheduler is running

If you do not see either line then Urchin is not running. To start Urchin type:

urchinctl start

If you only see the first line, then the Urchin scheduler is not running. To only start the Urchin scheduler type:

urchinctl -s start

The -s flag will only start the scheduler process.

Usually re-starting either Urchin or the Urchin scheduler process fixes the problem. However, it is possible that the Urchin service is running, but it is owned by a different user than that which owns the Urchin distribution. To verify who urchind is running as you can grep the output of the process status list:

ps -auxwww grep urchind

You should see output similar to this:

USER-NAME 91577 0.0 0.1 376 176 ?? Ss 14Jun05 11:40.44 /usr/local/urchin/bin/urchind

If the USER-NAME is different from the user that owns the Urchin distribution, you have to restart the service using the correct username. First, switch to the user that currently owns the urchind process and stop the process. Then switch to the correct Urchin user and start the process.