There is a program that we (a company I'm working for) would like to run once per day, and the approach we're taking is to create a fake user to give a location to the data for this program, and to be the user running the program. For the sake of the discussion, let me call the fake user "bob".
Since there is no actual person called bob, there is no reason to allow anyone to login as bob. If someone needs to do something to bob's data or programs, then they can su to bob.
Here's the problem: When I create a crontab for bob, it doesn't seem to run. Is there some reason that disabling logins would effect the ability to run crontab?
Here's a clue, perhaps. When I try to su to bob using
sudo su bob
I get the error message:
>Your account has expired; please contact your system administrator
>su: Authentication failure
>(Ignored)
But afterwards, whoami says that I am now bob. So I don't understand what that failure message means.
You did not say what OS you are running... and disabling an account is not the same as nologin
Nologin is used by some OS e.g. for FTP accounts, you cannot log in to the server (meaning having a proper login shell...) but the account is enabled and may have a passwd... really not the same as disabled....
Accounts can exist with several status settings - no network login, locked, active.
On most systems:
Code:
passwd -s bob
will show you the status. Also unless you have something like:
Code:
stevendaryl ALL (root) = ALL
in /etc/sudoers, you have to be root to execute authentication setup procedures.
The correct command to become bob and get the "bob" environment:
Code:
su - bob # as root
sudo su - bob # as stevendaryl
Note the dash with spaces around it.l
And what you want to do is common on every Linux/unix box - permanently locked user accounts like noaccess, lp have been part of the unix scene for a really really long time.
cron and at jobs will be not be executed if the user’s account is locked. Only accounts which are not locked as defined in shadow(4) will have their job or process executed.
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