Hello linoders ...

Does anyone have an explanation for this?

My cron stopped running -- completely, for all users including root -- ten days ago.

I haven't done anything to it, or added new jobs. Cron has just stopped. No evident problems before it stopped.

Would be grateful for any advice or pointers.

Is your crond process running? What distro?

Partly answering myself ...

/etc/init.d/cron restart

restarts cron.

But does not explain why it stopped in the first place.

Similar thing happened to me a while ago. Cron would just die for no reason and the only way I'd know it was dead was by no stats being submitted to RML.

This happened a few times. I moved to fcron and haven't had a problem since. This obviously doesn't fix crond but a seemingly more robust cron daemon did the trick.