Re: Need help: cron jobs can't access network drives.

[David Rothenberger <daveroth at acm dot org>]

Louis-Luc Le Guerrier wrote:

> On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, David Rothenberger wrote:
>
>
> > Louis-Luc Le Guerrier wrote:
> >
> > > Hello,
> > > I have tried Universal Name Convention path as well, and I still can't
> > > access the network drives, even with UNC paths inside the script ran by
> > > 'cron'. The same script invoked  manually accesses net drives of course.
> > >
> > > I have looked at "www.denicomp.com/faq.htm#Q21" and understand partially
> > > what they mean to do, but they don't explicitly explain how to perform
> > > the tasks in Windows.
> >
> > That page explains that to access a network share that requires user 
> > authentication, Windows needs a password, which isn't available to cron.
> >
> > For example, cron, running as the SYSTEM user, runs a job for 
> > Administrator.  It switches to the Administrator user to run the job, 
> > which tries to access a network share.  This share's permissions require 
> > the Administrator user to authenticate by providing the correct 
> > password.  But, cron has no such password, so the access fails.
> >
> > You should be able to access the network share if the share doesn't 
> > require you to authenticate to access it (i.e., it allows ac
> > "Everyone" per the Sharing settings).
>
> The target (sharing) machine has Windows XP, and I have not yet found
> how to change the share permission to "everyone". I remember that in
> previous Windows versions, but Microsoft seems to have moved options
> all around, and just this straight forward task seems complicated now.

I have XP Pro and don't have a problem with this.  Do you have Home or 
Pro?  In Pro, I just bring up Sharing and Security for the folder, go 
into permissions, click the button to add a user, then type "Everyone".

I have disabled simple file sharing on that machine, though.  Perhaps 
that's necessary?  See 
<http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307874> for 
more info on that.

It may also be that the folder being shared needs to be in an NTFS 
partition.

> I have been able to log in on the target machine as Administrator, with
> the same password, and made the share again. On the server (source
> machine) I also tried to create a SYSTEM account since none is in the
> user account list, but it refuses to create it saying one already exists.
> In any of these cases, nothing works, and I'm still unable to access
> the network drive with 'cron'. 
>
> On UNIX (cygwin) side, how can I tell 'cron' to execute with a different
> user than "Administrator"? Maybe this will work. How do I provide the
> password, then?

There may be a way to do it with cygrunsrv, but I normally do it with 
the Windows Services tool.  Just edit the existing service, go to the 
Log On tab, and the rest should be obvious.  You enter the password 
directly on that screen.



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