Cron not working

[Steve Phillips]

You will probably find that the tomcat user account is locked in the shadow
file (not having a valid password). Locked accounts tend to be limited in
what resources they can consume, cron being one of them - this is defined
with pam and the configuration file is found in /etc/pam.d/cron - part of
this config checks that the account is valid (password not expired etc) and
the access.conf file is also checked for overrides - hence why adding the
timcat user to access.conf allowed cron to work.

man 8 pam
man access.conf
man pam_access

for more information.

Also, it is unwise to tinker with these settings (pam configs) on a
production box as incorrectly setting pam modules can either render your
system un-usable or allow someone to bypass security and gain unauthorized
access to your system.

HTH,

-- 
Steve.

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 7:36 AM, Narayanan, Karthikeyan <knarayanan at webmd.net
> wrote:

> Ok, the issue is solved by having tomcat user in the
> '/etc/security/access.conf' file. But wondering why is this behavior.
>
> Thanks
> KK
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com
> [mailto:redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Geofrey Rainey
> Sent: Tuesday, August 04, 2009 5:33 PM
> To: General Red Hat Linux discussion list
> Subject: RE: Cron not working
>
> Does it work for other users? Is tomcat user the only user affected?
>
> You might want to post your cron entry.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com
> [mailto:redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Narayanan,
> Karthikeyan
> Sent: Wednesday, 5 August 2009 6:40 a.m.
> To: General Red Hat Linux discussion list
> Subject: RE: Cron not working
>
> There is no cron.allow exists. The cron.deny file is empty.
>
> Thanks
> Karthik
> Work : 646.674.5264
> Mob  : 603.380.0584
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com
> [mailto:redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of mark
> Sent: Tuesday, August 04, 2009 1:58 PM
> To: General Red Hat Linux discussion list
> Subject: Re: Cron not working
>
> Narayanan, Karthikeyan wrote:
> > Hello All,
> >
> > Not sure why but cron is not working on one of my RHEL AS x86_64 host
> > for user tomcat. I have checked the log files and no errors in there.
> >
> > Crond is running. Ran the cronjob via nohup and redirect both stdout
> and
> > stderr to a file with no result.
>
> Is the tomcat user allowed to use cron on that box?
>
>        mark
>
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