[gentoo-user] fcrontab -e: ERROR Could not init PAM account management (9)

[John Blinka]

Hello, Gentooers,

I have 3 amd64 Gentoo systems.  Somewhat different hardware, but all
running the same Gentoo profile, same world file, same /etc/portage.
All up to date, all using the same binpkgs for all installed hardware.
At least as far as I can tell. I don't have a robust mechanism for
enforcing consistency among the machines, but I try to maintain them
as identically as possible.  Little differences sneak in.

I've been using fcron for years, and I rarely need to touch it.
Recently I discovered that it works differently on the 3
machines.  Only for my personal user account "john", but not for root.

On 1 machine, fcrontab -e works as expected for "john".  On the other
2, it generates this error when invoked:
ERROR Could not init PAM account management (9): Authentication
service cannot retrieve authentication info

This message comes from inside fcrontab.  The source code indicates
that it occurs from a failure of a call to pam_acct_mgmt().  That's
the part of the pam interface which checks for a valid account.

The "john" account has no other pam issues.  It's the account I have
used for all normal activity for the 20+ years I've used Gentoo.  It
has the same /etc/passwd and /etc/group entries on all machines.
/etc/pamd.d is identical on all machines: content, timestamps, and
ownership included.  So, I'm at a loss for what to examine next.  I'm
thinking that atching what pam does on the working/nonworking machines
may provide some clues.

There's a pam_debug module that I assume is written to do just this.
But I find the man page confusing, and Google sheds more darkness than
light.

Can anyone explain how they debug pam problems?

Thanks,

John