cron logging under RHEL 4

[Steve Phillips]

David Tonhofer, m-plify S.A. wrote:
> --On Wednesday, May 24, 2006 7:50 AM +1200 Steve Phillips 
> <steve at focb.co.nz> wrote:
> 
>> Does anyone know how to turn off the logging messages from cron under 
>> redhat RHEL 4 ? I am refering to the messages in /var/log/messages 
>> that indicate a user has logged in/out every time a user crontab is 
>> called.. these tend to fill up the log files when a user has a number 
>> of cron entries that are called every minute.
>>
>> example..
>>
>> May 23 14:49:01 wibble crond(pam_unix)[13740]: session opened for user 
>> bot by (uid=0)
>> May 23 14:49:01 wibble crond(pam_unix)[13740]: session closed for user 
>> bot
> 
> Hi Steve,
> 
> First off, why should that be a problem? If you have enough disk space,
> and logrotate configured, I wouldn't worry.
> 
> But otherwise, check out the man page of "syslog.conf" where you find the
> instructions to edit /etc/syslog.conf.
> 
> However... these are not messages by cron but by the 'pam' subsystem.
> They are logged to syslog with facility 'auth', so you might want
> to make all messages logged with facility 'auth' and low urgency go
> to nowhere. Like this I think:
> 
> auth.debug;auth.info;auth.notice   /dev/null
> 
> But this may not be what you want as you may want to see other messages.
> So the following can also be done: edit /etc/pam.d/crond and make
> pam NOT log.... but I'm unsure how to do this. Anyone?

Sorry, yes, I should have been clearer, I need to find out how to make 
pam NOT consider this a login/logout session, from the pam(8) man page 
it seems that it is the session line that is at fault but I'm not too 
sure on what to do to tell (I am guessing) pam_loginuid.so to not log 
for this /etc/pam.d/crond entry only (I still want normal "zomg, someone 
actually logged in !" messages from things such as sshd)

-- 
Steve.