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/etc/cron.daily/apt: FATAL -> Failed to fork

Posted on September 26, 2014

I am using ubuntu 14.04 64 bit. I got the following messege through my email.

/etc/cron.daily/apt:
FATAL -> Failed to fork.
/etc/cron.daily/spamassassin:
channel: could not find working mirror, channel failed
sa-update failed for unknown reasons

And then I cannot login to my virtualmin https://mydomain.com:10000 and got the following message : “Server not found”

But I can login to https://mydomain.com:20000 to check my email.

When I try, login with SSH, everything is okay. Then I reboot and everything is work. I encountered this problem many times and have to reboot to resolve this issue.

I am sure this problem is in my webmin virtualmin but I don’t know how to fix this.

Please help me.



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Hello I’ve just received the same email from my server. I run “sa-update --refreshmirrors” as root, and it updated mirrors in /etc/spamassassin/sa-update-keys Now, when I run manually /etc/cron.daily/spamassassin, I have no error.

I don’t know the other error from apt-show-versions.

Hi! I’ve been receiving these emails on the last few days, after I installed Postfix into my Droplet. Even though I did not see OOM errors in the logs, I created a swap file following the steps from the mentioned tutorial. Let’s see if the problem is gone :)

Thank you!

I solved this by removing the apt-xapian-index package. It’s apparently a memory and CPU hog, and it’s run as part of the daily cron. To remove, do the following:

sudo apt-get remove apt-xapian-index -y

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