Fix broken cron installation on some systems

Owned by Anastasios Thomaidis
Last updated: Sept 26, 2024 by Matthew Hierholzer

A broken Cron resulted in wrong group ownerships. The problem is fixed with Werk #9390 and firmware version 1.4.8.

LAST TESTED ON FIRMWARE 1.4.8

Table of Contents

Problem

Previous firmware versions contained an error that resulted in wrong group ownerships for /var/spool/cron/crontab. This could result in the error below.

Cannot execute omd command omd start mysite: Creating temporary filesystem /omd/sites/mysite/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

The issue is fixed with Werk #9390 and firmware version 1.4.8 and above. This will not happen on a fresh installation with firmware 1.4.8 or above.

If you performed a firmware update to 1.4.7 or earlier, you may run into this issue. In this case, you need to change the group permissions of cron. After applying the fix below, this issue will not resurface.


To solve this problem, run the following commands:

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