18 06 2019

Encounted this error on a server when installing puppet, which runs under cron. The main things to check are;

That root is allowed to run cron etc in /etc/security/access.conf

+ : root : cron crond :0 tty1 tty2 tty3 tty4 tty5 tty6

Next up is to check the pam configuration for crond, it should look like the below.

# cat /etc/pam.d/crond 
#
# The PAM configuration file for the cron daemon
#
#
# No PAM authentication called, auth modules not needed
account    required   pam_access.so
account    include    password-auth
session    required   pam_loginuid.so
session    include    password-auth
auth       include    password-auth

In this particular case there was an issue with the pam file, and correcting it to the above fixed the issue, but I have seen issues with the cron line being commented out in the access.conf

puppet: Error 400 on SERVER: Attempt to assign to a reserved variable name: ‘trusted’ FreeIPA: Manually deleting host in LDAP