What invokes cricket on FreeBSD

[stan]

On Thu, Sep 03, 2009 at 07:48:57AM -0400, stan wrote:
> I have inherited a system that uses Cricket on FreeBSD to do some data
> collection. I have set this up myself in the distnat past, but this time I
> asked a contractor to set it up. I no longer have access to this
> contractor, and the toher day, we shut down the system this was running on,
> and when we rebooted the system, cricket id not resume collecting data.
> 
> I don't see anyhting in /usr/local/etc/rc.d to start it up, nor do I see
> anything in /etc/crontag. I don't seen any processes owned by cricket
> running.
> 
> In FreeBSD, how is this process noramally invoked?

Sorry to reply to my own message, but I have more data. I did find 

-rw-------  1 root  wheel  288 Jan 12  2009 /var/cron/tabs/cricke

Which is, I am failry certain, what is _intended_ to invoke the cricket
process. However, acording to the cricket logs, the last time I have an
entry is Aug 29th, which was when the machine was shut down. So, I decided
to try running this command by hand. Now, to do so I need to be the cricket
user, so I tried to su - cricket. I was told that this user was not
avaialble. Looking in /etc/passwd. I found that this users shell was listed
as /usr/sbin/nologin. I edited /etc/paswd to change this to /nin/sh, but I
still get the smae error message when I try to su to that user.

What do I need to change to be able to su to this suer, and might this be
the reason tha it's crontab entry is notbeing run?


-- 
One of the main causes of the fall of the roman empire was that, lacking
zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C
programs.