I have a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS an a number of servers. I have not added any cron jobs or edited my crontab on those servers, however, at around the same time for each machine, I get a 75% CPU spike and the following info in my syslog at the time of the spike: CRON[8380]: (CRON) info (No MTA installed, discarding output) I have mono-complete installed and am running a service stack webserver. What is the best way for me to stop this from happening? I would like to be able to remove the CPU spike. Linux uses mail for sending notifications to the user.

Crontab error with (No MTA installed). Info (No MTA installed, discarding output). Hindi Devanagari Unicode Keyboard. Fatal Error During Installation Kaspersky Endpoint Security there. Browse other questions tagged linux ubuntu vagrant or ask your own question. Why is my crontab not running. (CRON) info (No MTA installed, discarding output). Ubuntu apparantly does not have an MTA. So all of a sudden my Pi running Debian wont shutdown. Raspberry Pi will not shutdown/reboot. (CRON) info (No MTA installed, discarding output).

Most Linux distributions have a mail service (including an MTA) installed. Ubuntu doesn't though. You can install a mail service, postfix for example, to solve this problem. Sudo apt-get install postfix Or you can ignore it. I don't think the inability of cron to send messages has anything to do with the CPU spike (that's linked to the underlying job that cron is running). It might be safest to install an MTA and then read through the messages ( mutt is a good system mail reader). As stated in an earlier answer, this happens because your cron jobs are producing output, and then the cron daemon tries to email that output to you.

If you don’t want to (or can’t) install an MTA, but you want to see the output, you can redirect the output of the cron job to a log file. Edit your crontab file with crontab -e (use sudo if the issue is with root’s crontab) and add >>/some/log/file 2>&1 after every command, like this: 0 3 * * * cmd >>/some/log/file 2>&1 If there are multiple commands on a line, separated by;, && or , you should do the above for each command, like this: 0 3 * * * cmd 1 >>/some/log/file 2>&1; cmd 2 >>/some/log/file 2>&1 or group them, like this: 0 3 * * * ( cmd 1; cmd 2 ) >>/some/log/file 2>&1 If you want to ignore stdout and capture only stderr, use >/dev/null 2>>/some/log/file instead. Put the log file wherever you want — your home directory, /var/log, or even /tmp if you’re sure you won’t need to keep it. Then look at the log file after the job runs.