Re: Change in cron policy?

[Florian Kulzer <florian@molphys.leidenuniv.nl>]

On Sat, Aug 19, 2006 at 16:17:19 +0200, Stefan Bellon wrote:
> Since one week I wasn't able to use crontab by my user accounts. The
> message is
> 
> sbellon@io:~$ crontab -l
> You (sbellon) are not allowed to use this program (crontab)
> See crontab(1) for more information
> 
> The man page states, that when neither cron.allow nor cron.deny are
> present, then the site-default of Debian is taken, which is to allow
> all users the usage of cron.
> 
> I haven't knowingly changed anything on my system (apart from the usual
> apt-get upgrades) and so wonder why there is a change in behaviour now.
> 
> The permissions of /usr/bin/crontab seem all right (root:crontab and
> -rwxr-sr-x) as do the permissions of the actual files in
> /var/spool/cron/crontabs (user:crontab and 600).
> 
> I was able to get the users using cron again by touching an empty
> cron.deny file, but I'm still wondering ...
> 
> The system is Debian unstable, btw.

This is a known problem with cron 3.0pl1-96; see this bug report:
#383741: users can no longer use cron

A fixed cron package (version 3.0pl1-97) is already available in unstable.

-- 
Regards,
          Florian