Crontab won't run script

[Petrocelli08]

Hi All
I have a strange problem

I want to backup a directory on a FreeBSD mail server. I set up a script which runs the mount_smbfs command. It mounts the remote windows share, tars up the directory, copies it to the share and then unmounts the share. In I run it from the command line it works like so ./backup.sh or /usr/local/etc/backup.sh
When I it runs from /etc/crontab, I get this error below:

mount_smbfs: unable to open connection: syserr = Authentication error
umount: /home/backup: not a file system root directory

Any Ideas as to why this could be happening?

[DutchDaemon]

Does the script run under the correct permissions? Does it work when you run it from root's crontab (crontab -e as the root user) instead of from the system crontab?

[Petrocelli08]

My goodness, yes that works. Well I'll be a monkey's uncle. I relaize I had to use all absolute paths though but that's fine.

[DutchDaemon]

Originally Posted by Petrocelli08

I relaize I had to use all absolute paths though but that's fine.

Either that, or expand cron's path, like it's done at the top of /etc/crontab. You can do that to root's crontab just as well.

PATH=/etc:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin

This will cover most bases.

[marcel]

mount_smbfs with option -N tries to open $HOME/.nsmbrc for authentication.
In /etc/crontab, a non-standard HOME may be defined, disabling mount_smbfs to
find the configuration file. You could solve this by putting .nsmbrc into the HOME
directory specified in /etc/crontab, or by setting the HOME environment variable
to the directory where .nsmbrc resides from within the shell script where mount_smbfs is used.