[PLUG] logwatch report user account has expired

Josh josh at emediatedesigns.com
Wed Apr 19 15:13:58 UTC 2006



Josh wrote:
> alan wrote:
>> On Tue, 18 Apr 2006, Josh wrote:
>>
>>> Hello and happy post Easter to all.
>>>
>>> In my quest to build a new server I noticed I stopped receiving 
>>> emails from logwatch.  Hmm, was the cron not working?  So, I went 
>>> off and ran the script in the /etc/cron.daily and it reports many 
>>> lines of:
>>>
>>> crond[14463]: User account has expired
>>>
>>> Then continues with other information. I think I either have 
>>> permissions wrong or the users accounts that I need not to expire 
>>> have. I have been searching about the net and my dusty mind to find 
>>> an answer but no avail. I'm looking for a way to tell the status of 
>>> a user account? Is it expired? I have yet to find a simple way. Or 
>>> is this really the problem? Perhaps it is something more basic. It 
>>> appears that my cron jobs are not running. Still confirming this but 
>>> at least logwatch is complaining about expired accounts.
>>>
>>> Thoughts? Advice?
>>
>> Look in /etc/shadow and see what system accounts have expiration 
>> dates on them.
>>
>>
>> The format of the shadow file is described in:
>>
>>     man 5 shadow
>>
>> Hope that helps.
>>
> Well, I went through the shadow file and still don't see anything that 
> would cause it.  I have one Fedora 1 Machine that is working fine and 
> a CentOS 4.2 that is not.  The latter was working until 7 days ago.  I 
> can see that in the cron logs.  I have very little users on the new 
> machine so it is easy to look at them.  They appear to have the same 
> settings as the old machine.
> I don't even know which accounts are expired.  The message repeats for 
> a long time.  Like 30-50 times. then it goes on with other logwatch 
> reports.
> Josh

Just thought to send and update.  I found the issue to be the cron jobs 
are not executing correctly.  I'm going through each one but any that 
are run as a user appear not to work.  Don't know why yet but sure it's 
a permission or configuration of cron. 

Josh 



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