I have (eventually) got round to upgrading my RH7.1 server. Now I'm using CentOS 5 - which is great and so far everything is doing what it should.

I run a fetchmail cron with multidrop. Before on my RH7.1 I simply had the .fetchmailrc in /root and then had the following lines in my crontab (root's crontab I should add)

0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 7-23 * * 0-6 /usr/bin/fetchmail -E X-Envelope-To -s
0 0-6 * * 0-6 /usr/bin/fetchmail -E X-Envelope-To -s

I've done the same again (ie .fetchmailrc in /root and the same crontab entries), however I am getting mail to root everytime it runs saying:

Subject: Cron <root@catulus> /usr/bin/fetchmail -E X-Envelope-To -s
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated
X-Cron-Env: <SHELL=/bin/sh>
X-Cron-Env: <HOME=/root>
X-Cron-Env: <PATH=/usr/bin:/bin>
X-Cron-Env: <LOGNAME=root>
X-Cron-Env: <USER=root>

fetchmail: WARNING: Running as root is discouraged.

Why? I never got messages before with an identical script.

If it shouldn't running as root, how should I run it?
Do user's cron jobs only run when they are logged in?

Thanks

RH 7.1 is ancient and was probably running an equally ancient version of fetchmail. The don't run as root warning was probably added in a later version of fetchmail. It's good advice, too, if you run fetchmail as root and there is a security flaw in it or you have it con figured badly, then a malicious server or mail message could be used to gain complete control of your system for an attacker.

The solution is to run fetchmail as a nonprivileged user. A user's cron jobs run whenever they are scheduled -- not jsut when the user is logged in.

Thanks for that. Will run it as a user instead!