Well miraculously both the digest mailer and the auto backups started working again this morning.
I'm still waiting for some clarity from my hosting service but I know they were looking into the cron job for me so I suspect they found it was stuck and just kicked it off again.
The only thing I had changed in the meantime was to correct the next db backup date to yesterday evening but I can't think how that would have kicked off the cron job again unless the wrong date had set a permanent error condition which caused the cron job to bail out each time it ran and before it could process the queued digests. But this is just guesswork because I have no knowledge of how the scheduled phpBB tasks are queued and in what order they are processed.
Anyhow - all is now running again as before and I'm also delighted and impressed that Digests mailer does a catch-up of all digests missed since the problem first occurred. Kudos to Mark the developer to design in that recovery! It also seems to further support the theory that it was a cron job problem as the digests were queued but just not sent.
Thanks to all who posted their thoughts. Your willingness to help a not-too-technocal-newbie is much appreciated.
Andy
I'm still waiting for some clarity from my hosting service but I know they were looking into the cron job for me so I suspect they found it was stuck and just kicked it off again.
The only thing I had changed in the meantime was to correct the next db backup date to yesterday evening but I can't think how that would have kicked off the cron job again unless the wrong date had set a permanent error condition which caused the cron job to bail out each time it ran and before it could process the queued digests. But this is just guesswork because I have no knowledge of how the scheduled phpBB tasks are queued and in what order they are processed.
Anyhow - all is now running again as before and I'm also delighted and impressed that Digests mailer does a catch-up of all digests missed since the problem first occurred. Kudos to Mark the developer to design in that recovery! It also seems to further support the theory that it was a cron job problem as the digests were queued but just not sent.
Thanks to all who posted their thoughts. Your willingness to help a not-too-technocal-newbie is much appreciated.
Andy
Statistics: Posted by AndySt — Tue Dec 24, 2024 10:38 am