cron stopped working, permission denied message in auth.log

[Frederik Vanrenterghem <frederik.vanrenterghem@chello.be>]

Hi all,

I'm rather lost with this problem, which has caused cron to stop
functioning on my debian unstable system. No ideas really on what might
be going on, but /var/log/auth.log is filled with messages like:

Sep 10 20:32:01 maui cron(pam_unix)[22140]: session opened for user root
by (uid=0)
Sep 10 20:32:01 maui CRON[22140]: Permission denied
Sep 10 20:33:01 maui cron(pam_unix)[22247]: session opened for user root
by (uid=0)
Sep 10 20:33:01 maui CRON[22247]: Permission denied

I'd appreciate your help... Please CC me on any replies, since I'm not
subscribed.

Thanks!
Frederik
-- 
"They that can give up liberty to obtain 
a little temporary safety deserve
neither liberty nor safety."
  - Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)