ServerBuddies Support Blog

How to setup a cron job

This tutorial covers how to setup a Cron job. Cron is a service for executing scheduled commands.

It assumes you have first logged into Virtualmin.

Click Webmin on the top-left.

Click Services.

Click Scheduled Cron Jobs.

Click Create a new scheduled cron job.

Choose the user to run as, and input the username in Execute cron job as. To run as the administrative user, input root .

Enter the command to run into the Command field. For example, if you want to receive a list of all running processes, enter ps auxw for the command.

Normally, you can skip Input to command. That’s only used if your command requires input after it begins running.

Choose how frequently to run your command. By default, it will execute Hourly, meaning it will execute at the top of the hour, every hour.

To enable the Cron job, click Create.

Any output will be emailed to the root user.

Setup wvdial to dial your ISP

If you are using a dial-up internet connection, then you may configure your linux box to connect to the internet as discussed below.

Before you attempt to get dial-on-demand working, you need to make sure that you can dial up your ISP.
If this is the first time you are connecting to the internet, then you have to ’su’ to root and execute the ‘wvdialconf’ script. This would build a configuration file for wvdial. It detects your modem, its maximum baud rate, and a good initialization string and generates or updates the wvdial configuration file based on this information.

This will produce the configuration file /etc/wvdial.conf having entries such as:-

You can now fill in your ISP’s phone number, your username and password. You should now be able to run wvdial and connect to the Internet. Type wvdial and you should see several lines scroll past and will stop after starting pppd. To stop the connection, press - C.

You may re-arrange your wvdial.conf to separate the modem configuration from any ISP account details.

Suppose your service provider is ABC, you may configure the username and password to dial the phone number 12345 as shown above.

Now, you may execute the following command to connect to the internet:-

You may find output such as:-

The above method should work fine for other Linux distros with slight modification.