OK, I'm running a number of Debian machines with users authenticating via LDAP. I've basically inherited this network of machines so it's quite a steep learning process. There are a number of things which are broken which I would like to fix.

The first of which is crontab. Crontab works for me because I'm in the /etc/shadow file (I assume this is the reason). Normal users can access crontab (I don't have an allow / deny file) but the actual cron job isn't run. The message I get is "CRON[10557]: Authentication service cannot retrieve authentication info."

Any ideas? I've searched and found that a number of people had this error message when Exim was trying to run a cron job but mailman wasn't in the /etc/shadow file. It's not really viable to add all my users to the /etc/shadow file ...


Thanks in advance,


Nathan.

Not really an answer to your question, but ...

I've just created a local user with NO shadow-entry.
Setting up a cronjob and running it was no problem.

But then, this is slack, and no LDAP anywhere near
it, either ...


Cheers,
Tink

The problem must be that Cron can't authenticate LDAP users. I don't know how to fix it though, so any ideas would be great!