UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have a problem with running jobs out of cron on Solaris 8.

Initially when one of the users on the box (other than root) attempted to save the crontab after modification by using "crontab -e", the message "Crontab: cannot open the crontab file in the crontab directory" was given.

I then checked all the permissions on
/var/spool/cron/crontab
/usr/spool/cron/crontab
/etc/cron.d
and
checked the cron.allow and cron.deny files incase the user was in there.


Following these changes the user can now edit the cron, however this message "error in message queue open" is given and cron does not run the jobs submitted.

Any ideas on how to solve this one? and have my permission changes done anything funky?

Cheers.

check the ownership and permission of /usr/bin/crontab. this will solve u'r problem

-kumaran

Cheers this would have fixed the initial problem of not being able to edit the cron. However I fixed that and following these changes the user can now edit the cron.

The problem now is this message

"error in message queue open".

Which would be ok except.......... cron does not run the jobs submitted ever .

Any ideas?

Changing permissions on OS files is the root cause of your problem. Why would you tell us that you changed the permissions, but not what those changes were?

Change all files permissions back the way Sun intended.

Ok here are my permissions, I had to change them because this was the cause of the original problem (could not write to the crontab file). Also I have no idea what the original Sun settings were because I have only just inherited this box


-rwxrwxrwx 1 bwadmin bwadmin 17224 Jun 19 2003 crontab
ns-1:/usr/bin$

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 Oct 26 17:39 cron -> ../usr/sbin/cron*
drwxrwxrwx 2 root sys 512 Dec 16 10:06 cron.d/
ns-1:/etc$ pwd

drwxr-xr-x 4 root sys 512 Dec 16 12:01 cron/
ns-1:/var/spool$

drwxr-xr-x 2 root sys 512 Oct 26 17:39 atjobs/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root other 0 Dec 16 12:01 cron.deny
drwxrwxrwx 2 root sys 512 Dec 16 17:49 crontabs/
ns-1:/var/spool/cron$

total 12
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 190 Oct 26 17:39 adm
-r-------- 1 bwadmin bwadmin 81 Dec 16 17:49 bwadmin
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 750 Oct 26 17:39 lp
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 482 Dec 16 10:17 root
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 308 Oct 26 18:00 sys
-r--r--r-- 1 root sys 404 Oct 26 18:02 uucp
ns-1:/var/spool/cron/crontabs$

Hi,

You have a lot of changed permissions... right now, if you want to solve the specific question about crontab, just change the owner of /usr/bin/crontab to root and it must be suid...

You don't need world writabble permissions on /etc/cron.d, neither on /var/spool/cron/crontabs directories... Remove write permissions to all user crontab files, crontab suid root will be able to update them...

Well, check everything you've changed and replace the original permissions... it's very important !

You've got a mess here, but there may be a fairly easy way out. Make a wide window and cd to /var/sadm/install. The file called contents records the files that were installed when the os was installed. So type "grep cron contents". The lines you see should tell you what to do. For example, I get a line that says:

/usr/bin/crontab f none 4555 root bin 17224 45844 1046476302 SUNWcsu

I don't understand all of the fields, but fields 4, 5, and 6 tell me that if the crontab command had the wrong permissions, I could just do:

chown root:bin /usr/bin/crontab
chmod 4555 /usr/bin/crontab

and I'd be back in business.

I have never used it, but Sun has a program called pkgchk that can check a package. In fact, do a "man -k pkg" to see all of the pkg stuff.