Speedtest fails under cron but works manually

[dutts]

Hi,

Thank you for doing this, since working from home full time recently and battling with a ropey Sky Broadband connection this has been an invaluable use of a spare pi I had lying around.

I have one issue that I can't figure out though; the Speedtest runs fine when I log in as pi and execute python3 /opt/netperf/test_network.py isp the script completes and my speed test data ends up in the database and graph but never works under cron with this line 5,35 * * * * python3 /opt/netperf/test_network.py isp > /dev/null

I get a zero result and the following entries in netperf.log

2020-11-06 16:05:02,196 test_network INFO:Testing Internet speed...
2020-11-06 16:05:02,204 test_network INFO:Speedtest failed.
2020-11-06 16:05:02,205 netperf_db DEBUG:{'type': 'speedtest', 'data': {'client_id': '60765', 'timestamp': 1604678702.2052596, 'rx_Mbps': 0, 'tx_Mbps': 0, 'rx_bytes': 0, 'tx_bytes': 0, 'remote_host': 'n/a', 'url': 'n/a', 'ping': 0}}
2020-11-06 16:05:02,206 netperf_db DEBUG:message type is: speedtest
2020-11-06 16:05:02,206 netperf_db DEBUG:received message type: speedtest data: {"client_id": "60765", "timestamp": 1604678702.2052596, "rx_Mbps": 0, "tx_Mbps": 0, "rx_bytes": 0, "tx_bytes": 0, "remote_host": "n/a", "url": "n/a", "ping": 0}

Cron's log entry in /var/log/syslog shows it running as user pi

Nov  6 16:05:01 raspberrypi CRON[17221]: (pi) CMD (python3 /opt/netperf/test_network.py isp > /dev/null)

The other cron jobs work fine, any ideas what's going wrong or how I can further diagnose the issue?

Thanks again

Rich

[mr-canoehead]

Does the db row count for the 'speedtest' table increment when the job runs via the 'pi' user's crontab? You can view the rowcounts by using the following command:

/opt/netperf/tools/db_rowcounts.sh

Do any relevant message show up in the syslog, particularly immediately after the cron job runs?

Are you using the open source 'speedtest-cli' or Ookla's client?

Can you please send me the following via email (mr_canoehead@telus.net): 1) /opt/netperf/config/netperf.json 2) the contents of the 'pi' user crontab (crontab -l > crontab.txt)

Just to make sure this isn't a general problem I reinstalled the project on my RPi 4B today (it's been busy with another project), am not experiencing this issue.

Thanks, Chris

[dutts]

Apologies for the delay in getting back to you, I realised that my pi might not have been in such good health as some deeper digging into some other bizarre behaviour was giving me segmentation faults. Have dug out a fresh micros card and will try a new install shortly.

Will close if I can't reproduce.

[scradster]

First of all, thanks a lot @mr-canoehead for the awesome project. Installed it today and it works like a charm! Thanks to the wiki the installation is really straight forward and easy 👍

I faced the same problem as @dutts and was able to resolve it after looking at this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14612444/bash-script-runs-manually-but-fails-on-crontab

I changed the following line https://github.com/mr-canoehead/network_performance_monitor/blob/ca88f4010d5171ffea77578a5c6ea350491b0c02/netperf/test_network.py#L145 to include the full path to speedtest-cli which i found using which speedtest-cli like this:

cmd = "{}/usr/local/bin/speedtest-cli --json {}".format(cmd_prefix,speedtest_server_opt)

This resolves the issue for me.

[dutts]

First of all, thanks a lot @mr-canoehead for the awesome project. Installed it today and it works like a charm! Thanks to the wiki the installation is really straight forward and easy 👍

I faced the same problem as @dutts and was able to resolve it after looking at this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14612444/bash-script-runs-manually-but-fails-on-crontab

I changed the following line

https://github.com/mr-canoehead/network_performance_monitor/blob/ca88f4010d5171ffea77578a5c6ea350491b0c02/netperf/test_network.py#L145

to include the full path to speedtest-cli which i found using which speedtest-cli like this: cmd = "{}/usr/local/bin/speedtest-cli --json {}".format(cmd_prefix,speedtest_server_opt)

This resolves the issue for me.

Great spot! I hadn’t had a chance to dig into this yet so glad it’s been solved!