Softpanorama

May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)
Home Switchboard Unix Administration Red Hat TCP/IP Networks Neoliberalism Toxic Managers
(slightly skeptical) Educational society promoting "Back to basics" movement against IT overcomplexity and  bastardization of classic Unix

Ordinary users in SLES 11 and 10 are denied access to cron

News

Suse Troubleshooting

Recommended Links Cron and Crontab commands chkstat utility and permissions files in SUSE (/etc/permissions.local, .easy and .secure)  
Baseliners Suse config files Suse Log Files RC scripts  Network configuration Cool solutions
SLES Documentation Suse Tips Sysadmin Horror Stories Suse Tips

Humor

Etc

In SuSE you have 3 security levels, which determine what permissions.* file is applied to the filesystem:
easy, secure and paranoid. So you have permissions.easy , permissions.secure and permissions.paranoid files under /etc. You can set the security level via YAST -> Security and Users -> Security Settings

You can also edit the corresponding permissions.* file.

Looks that on SLES 11 and SLES 10 with security setting secure  (with easy setting thing are OK) systems permissions for crontab are

-rwsr-x--- 1 root trusted 40432 May 8 2012 /usr/bin/crontab

And ordinary users are unable to use cron.

This strange permission setting occurs because on this particular server security level option (set in YAST in Security & Hardening) when the security level is set to "secure" template, instead of the default (easy).   If this setting is in place, that means that no ordinary user can use crontab. Looks like for secure security setting (with easy setting thing are OK)  in their infinite wisdom SLES developers introduced group trusted as if cron.allow and cron.deny files are not enough.

I would recommend resetting permission to  4755

-rwsr-xr-x 1 root trusted 40432 May 8 2010 /usr/bin/crontab

In addition to changing the permissions of crontab, you also have to put a line in /etc/permissions.local in order to keep updates from changing it back to 4750.

/usr/bin/crontab             root:trusted    4755

I tested this solution and it looks like it works.

By default group trusted has no members, but what is interesting that adding user (say oracle) to this group did not solve the problem for me.

The most relent post on the subject that I have found is by the user dsonck92 in Open sus forum (user access crontab, 01-Dec-2011)

If anyone comes across this same problem with openSUSE 12.1 or maybe an earlier/later version, this is the reason/solution:

There is a system that checks the permissions of important files/programs. With YaST you can change your file security setting to

easy/secure/paranoid

using the 'Security Center and Hardening' tool. A program called 'chkstat' will then check and change the permissions of the files according to /etc/permissions.* at boot time.

When you set the permissions to secure, this program will (according to permissions.secure) change the permissions of /usr/bin/crontab to 4750 with the owner to root:trusted in order to prevent untrusted people from accessing important files (like crontab).

If you want the old situation back, you can either:

Again, adding the user it the group trusted for me did not work.


Top updates

Bulletin Latest Past week Past month
Google Search


NEWS CONTENTS

Old News ;-)

[Apr 18, 2014] user access crontab

dsonck92 , 01-Dec-2011

If anyone comes across this same problem with openSUSE 12.1 or maybe an earlier/later version, this is the reason/solution:

There is a system that checks the permissions of important files/programs. With YaST you can change your file security setting to easy/secure/paranoid
using the 'Security Center and Hardening' tool. A program called 'chkstat' will then check and change the permissions of the files according to /etc/permissions.*
at boot time.

When you set the permissions to secure, this program will (according to permissions.secure) change the permissions of /usr/bin/crontab to
4750 with the owner to root:trusted in order to prevent untrusted people from accessing important files (like crontab).

If you want the old situation back, you can either:
- Choose the easy permissions option in YaST,

- Add yourself to the group 'trusted', This way you won't get the warning unsafe profile, the permissions will be correct at boot time and it won't be overwritten when updating some package.

- A third option is to add the line '/usr/bin/crontab root:root 4755' to /etc/permissions.local. It has the same

result as adding yourself to 'trusted' but the permissions are not safe. Use with caution.

crontab Permission denied - The Danesh Project

The Danesh Project

" -bash: /usr/bin/crontab: Permission denied ".

I was getting this error earlier today while trying to add cron jobs for my login on my SLES 10 box at work. Turns out that all users in SLES 10 by default have no access to cron.

The fix is to add the user to the "trusted" group in the group file (/etc/group). Let's assume mu login is "elf".

1. Make sure you are "root".

2. #usermod -G trusted elf
This will add the user to the "trusted" group.

3. #id elf
Display groups the user belongs to. Make sure "trusted" is on the list too.
The output might look like this. "uid=502(danny) gid=502(users) groups=502(elf),11(trusted)"
4. #su – elf
Change user

5. #crontab -e
Add/Remove/Edit user cron jobs.

6. #crontab -l
List user scheduled cron jobs

usr-bin-crontab Permission denied Yenlo


-bash: /usr/bin/crontab: Permission denied
december 30th, 2008
Yenlo
Software development
No Comments

By default de Oracle user has no priviledges to add cron jobs under SLES 10.
when trying to do so you will recieve an error which looks something close to this :

oracle@xxx:~> crontab -l
-bash: /usr/bin/crontab: Permission denied

The solution to this is to add the "trusted" group to the user oracle.
To so this , you can login as root and preform this command :

[]oracle@xxx:~> su
Password:
xxx:/ # usermod -G trusted oracle
xxx:/ # exit
[]oracle@xxx:~> crontab -l
-bash: /usr/bin/crontab: Permission denied

After have done so, you need to login with oracle again to let the changes work.

[]oracle@xxx:~> su - oracle
Password:
[]oracle@xxx:~> crontab -l
no crontab for oracle

You can now either use
[]oracle@xxx:~>crontab -e
(to add,remove or edit the oracle cron jobs)

usr-bin-crontab permissions are wrong. Please set to 4755 - cPanel Forums

Could someone explain me why would cPanel change the permissions of crontab incorrectly? I had fixed them and on the update they got messed up again. Is this a bug or is there something wrong on my server?

/usr/bin/crontab permissions are wrong. Please set to 4755

Recommended Links

Google matched content

Softpanorama Recommended

Top articles

Sites

Top articles

Sites

...



Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotesSomerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose BierceBernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOSProgramming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC developmentScripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-MonthHow to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D


Copyright © 1996-2021 by Softpanorama Society. www.softpanorama.org was initially created as a service to the (now defunct) UN Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) without any remuneration. This document is an industrial compilation designed and created exclusively for educational use and is distributed under the Softpanorama Content License. Original materials copyright belong to respective owners. Quotes are made for educational purposes only in compliance with the fair use doctrine.

FAIR USE NOTICE This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to advance understanding of computer science, IT technology, economic, scientific, and social issues. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided by section 107 of the US Copyright Law according to which such material can be distributed without profit exclusively for research and educational purposes.

This is a Spartan WHYFF (We Help You For Free) site written by people for whom English is not a native language. Grammar and spelling errors should be expected. The site contain some broken links as it develops like a living tree...

You can use PayPal to to buy a cup of coffee for authors of this site

Disclaimer:

The statements, views and opinions presented on this web page are those of the author (or referenced source) and are not endorsed by, nor do they necessarily reflect, the opinions of the Softpanorama society. We do not warrant the correctness of the information provided or its fitness for any purpose. The site uses AdSense so you need to be aware of Google privacy policy. You you do not want to be tracked by Google please disable Javascript for this site. This site is perfectly usable without Javascript.

Last modified: March 12, 2019