Fix broken cron installation on some systems

Owned by Anastasios Thomaidis
Last updated: Oct 20, 2023 by Matthew Hierholzer
1 min read

Broken Cron resulting in wrong group ownerships. The problem is fixed with Werk #9390 from the firmware version 1.4.9.

LAST TESTED ON APPLIANCE 1.4.9

Table of Contents

Problem

Previous firmware versions contained an error that resulted in wrong group ownerships for, e.g.,/var/spool/cron/crontab. This resulted in broken cron handling and failing clusters.

Cannot execute omd command omd start tkds: Creating temporary filesystem /omd/sites/tkds/tmp...Starting mkeventd...OK
Starting liveproxyd...OK
Starting mknotifyd...OK
Starting rrdcached...OK
Starting cmc...OK
Starting apache...OK
Starting dcd...OK
Starting stunnel...OK
Starting xinetd...OK
Initializing Crontab.../var/spool/cron/: mkstemp: Permission denied
close failed in file object destructor:
sys.excepthook is missing
lost sys.stderr
ERROR
OK


Solution

To solve this problem, run the following commands:

root@linux~# chgrp crontab /var/spool/cron/crontab
root@linux~# dpkg-reconfigure cron


The problem is fixed with Werk #9390 from the firmware version 1.4.9. This will not happen after a fresh installation. 

If you do a firmware update from < 1.4.9, you may run into this problem. If this happens, you need to change the group permissions of cron. From that point, it will never happen again.