Re: [gentoo-user] vixie cron: PAM ERROR

[Nilesh Govindrajan]

On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 9:29 PM, Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards@×××××.com>wrote:

> On a newly installed system, I'm getting error messages from vixie cron
> about PAM authentication errors:
>
> Feb 25 09:52:01 alpha crond[23085]: (root) PAM ERROR (Authentication
> failure)
> Feb 25 09:52:01 alpha crond[23085]: (root) FAILED to authorize user with
> PAM (Authentication failure)
> Feb 25 09:53:01 alpha cron[23118]: (root) CMD (echo "cron ran at $(date)"
> >>/tmp/cron.out)
> Feb 25 09:53:01 alpha crond[23122]: (root) PAM ERROR (Authentication
> failure)
> Feb 25 09:53:01 alpha crond[23122]: (root) FAILED to authorize user with
> PAM (Authentication failure)
> Feb 25 09:54:01 alpha cron[23153]: (root) CMD (echo "cron ran at $(date)"
> >>/tmp/cron.out)
> Feb 25 09:54:01 alpha crond[23157]: (root) PAM ERROR (Authentication
> failure)
> Feb 25 09:54:01 alpha crond[23157]: (root) FAILED to authorize user with
> PAM (Authentication failure)
> Feb 25 09:55:01 alpha cron[23160]: (root) CMD (echo "cron ran at $(date)"
> >>/tmp/cron.out)
> Feb 25 09:55:01 alpha crond[23164]: (root) PAM ERROR (Authentication
> failure)
> Feb 25 09:55:01 alpha crond[23164]: (root) FAILED to authorize user with
> PAM (Authentication failure)
>
> AFAICT, it runs the scheduled command except for the very first time.
>
> I get the same results with normal user's crontab entries.
>
> --
> Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! Wow!  Look!!  A
> stray
>                                   at               meatball!!  Let's
> interview
>                               gmail.com            it!
>
>
>
Sounds like a pam configuration error. Try this?
http://www.shanison.com/2012/02/08/crontab-error-failed-to-open-pam-security-session-success/
There are a couple of other blogs too on Google search, but all of them
describe 'security error'. Your's seems to be different.