cron log

[Michael_33]

hi,

i got this in my cron job log:
! bad user (oradb) Sun Jan 23 04:02:00 2005

any idea? high points!

[Denver Osborn]

do you have a cron.allow or cron.deny in /var/adm/cron/?

The "! bad user (oradb)" error, is it what you're seeing in /var/adm/cron/log or is the from the output of another script that happens to be kicked of from cron?

-denver

[Michael_33]

i am sure that oradb user is not in the cron.deny file. i just vi /var/cron/log and
saw that messages

[Michael_33]

actually my OS is solaris 9, any other idea?
thx!

[Denver Osborn]

I'm a hp-ux nerd, but cron is cron... anywho, sounds like it could be an auth problem for the oradb user? (google) :)

look here

http://forum.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=23610&tstart=90

hope this helps,
-denver

[Denver Osborn]

and one last one that might be good.

http://mt.oisec.net/archive/2004/08/04/solaris_9s_crontab

anyway, confirms it could be a problem w/ the oradb account

-denver

[Michael_33]

thx and go on ..........

[Michael_33]

but i can su to oradb without any problem, that means this acct is not locked...., and how to check whether the password is expired?

[Denver Osborn]

and that's where I'm not much help (other than asking for you to read me some solaris 9 man pages)

Although I can say on HP-UX you can have a "locked" account on a trusted system and still su to the account from root...

what does "passwd -s oradb" return, is it LK or NP or??

-denver

[Michael_33]

bingo!!!
it's LK....
and how to unlock this user??

[Denver Osborn]

I'm about to get outta here and just one last bit of info... "man 4 shadow" may help you w/ checking passwd expiration, etc...

"Each entry in the shadow file has the form:

username:password:lastchg: min:max:warn: inactive:expire:flag"

thanks and good luck
-denver

[Denver Osborn · Accepted solution]

"passwd -u oradb" should unlock the account... and I'm assuming that this account is an account that had a passwd... so tha password field of /etc/shadow may have been something line *LK*:

if there was no password, then it probably intended to be a non-login account... in that case "passwd -N oradb" will set it to non-login, but will satisfy the cron problem.

refer to man passwd for more details and to verify my syntax. :)

and this is really all I've got...
-denver

[Michael_33]

perfect! thx!