Skip to main content

Cron Errors

Not sure how to file this particular issue, as it probably is not very common.

Summary:  if you see "Unable to change UID to" or "Unable to change GID to"  in your syslog, you should go review the file ownership and file name of your cron files.

Sep 13 10:25:02 cypher crond[32723]: pam_keyinit(crond:session): Unable to change GID to 1063 temporarily
Sep 13 10:25:02 cypher crond[32723]: pam_keyinit(crond:session): Unable to change UID to 60064 temporarily 

My specific issue happened because a username was changed which had the UID of 60064.

Previously
 jradtke:x:60064:1063:James Radtke:/home/jradtke:/bin/bash
 [jradtke@cyper Kickstart]$ sudo ls -l /var/spool/cron/ | grep jrad
-rw-------. 1 jradtke jradtke 25 Sep 13 11:57 jradtke


Now.. my username had been changed to
jradtke@corp.company.com

jradtke@corp.company.com:x:60064:1063:James Radtke:/home/jradtke:/bin/bash

To remedy the issue:
mv /var/spool/cron/jradtke /var/spool/cron/jradtke@corp.company.com
chown `getent passwd jradtke@corp.company.com | awk -F\: '{ print $3":"$4 }'` /var/spool/cron/jradtke@corp.company.com

I decided to document this as I was unable to find any useful information that dealt with my particular situation.  (all the other examples with that error mentioned updating pam, etc...)

  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

RHN Satellite Server (spacewalk) repomd.xml not found

"repomd.xml not found" If you add a channel, or if your RHN cache gets corrupted, and one of your guests complains that it cannot find repomd.xml for jb-ews-2-x86_64-server-5-rpm (for example) - you need to rebuild your repodata cache. Normally this is an automated job - which is exemplified by the fact that you have obviously built out your entire Satellite environment and never had to do any of the steps you are about to do. So - some prep work: Open 3 terminals to your Satellite Server and run: # Term 1 cd /var/cache/rhn watch "ls -l | wc -l" # Term 2 pwd cd /var/log/rhn tail -f rhn_taskomatic_daemon.log # Term 3 satellite-sync --channel=jb-ews-2-x86_64-server-5-rpm Once the satellite-sync has completed, you >should< see the count increment by one.  If you are unlucky (like me) you will not. You then need to login to the Satellite WebUI as the satellite admin user. Click on the Admin tab (at the top) Task Schedules (on the left) fin

Install RHEL 7 on old HP DL380 g5

Someone at work had been running RHEL on an HP DL380 G5 and blew it up.  After several attempts at doing an installation that made me conclude the hardware was actually bad... I kept digging for the answer. Attempt install and Anaconda could not find any disks - try a Drivers Disk (dd.img) both cciss and hpsa.   -- once we did that, when the system would reboot it would say it could not find a disk. hmmm. Boot from your installation media and interrupt the startup at grub. Add hpsa.hpsa_allow_any=1 hpsa.hpsa_simple_mode=1 to the line starting with linuxefi press CTRL-X to boot. Once the system restarts after the install, you need to once again interrupt the startup and add the line from above. After the system starts, edit /etc/default/grub and add those 2 parameters to the end of the line starting with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX (which likely has quiet at the end of the line currently). then run # cp /boot/grub2/grub.cfg /boot/grub2/grub.cfg.orig # grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2

MOTD with colors! (also applies to shell profiles)

I'm not sure why I had never looked into this before, but this evening I became obsessed with discovering how to present different colored text in the /etc/motd. A person had suggested creating a shell script (rather than using special editing modes in vi, or something) and I agree that is the simplest way of getting this accomplished quickly. This most noteworthy portion of this script is the following: RESET="\033[0m" that puts the users shell back to the original color. I typically like a green text on black background. Also - a great reference for the different colors and font-type (underscore, etc...) https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Color_Bash_Prompt I found this example on the web and I wish I could recall where so that I could provide credit to that person. #!/bin/bash #define the filename to use as output motd="/etc/motd" # Collect useful information about your system # $USER is automatically defined HOSTNAME=`uname -n` KERNEL=`un