problem starting crontab services

[Pierre A. Humblet]

> From: "Larry Hall (Cygwin)" 
> To: cygwin
> Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 10:27 PM
> Subject: Re: problem starting crontab services

>> On 09/08/2006, Jon Barber wrote:
>> hello cygwin gurus
>> 
>> i can't get crontab services to start.  i just followed the instruction 
>> from running cron_diagnose.sh version 1.5, and there were a number of 
>> things it reported wrong that i tried to fix.  the final problem is when i 
>> try to start cron, i get the following error:
>> 
>>        $ cygrunsrv --start cron
>>        cygrunsrv: Error starting a service: QueryServiceStatus:  Win32
>>        error 1062:
>>        The service has not been started.
>> 
>> attached is the output of 'cygcheck -srv > cygcheck.txt'
>> 
>> any help very much appreciated
>> 
>> jon barber
>> 
>> ----------------------------
>> 
>> my entire log of steps i tried is this:
>> 
>> following the instructions here:  
>> http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2004-03/msg00379.html, which involves 
>> successively running a diagnostic script to find config errors
>> 
>>    * i downloaded and ran the cron_diagnose.sh script
>>    * it first reported the following
>> 
>>        The permissions on the file /etc/passwd are not correct.
>>        Please run 'chmod +r /etc/passwd', and run this script again.
>> 
>>    * when i looked in /etc, i saw that many of the files were owned by
>>      "thadmin", which was the administrative account we originally used
>>      to setup the machine.
>>    * so i chown'ed most of those files to Administrator, and chmod'ed
>>      them +r, and ran the script again.    * it still complained that 
>> /etc/passwd had incorrect permissions -
>>      turns out /etc/passwd is "-rwxr-xr--+", so i modified the script
>>      to accept the + sign in hopes that doesn't matter
>>    * it then reported the following
>> 
>>        The permissions on the file /etc/group are not correct.
>>        Please run 'chmod +r /etc/group', and run this script again.
>> 
>>    * so i chmod'ed it +r, and ran the script again.    * it then reported 
>> the following
>> 
>>        The group membership of your crontab file should be SYSTEM,
>>        as documented in the file /usr/share/doc/Cygwin/cron.README.
>>        You can change this setting with:
>>                 chgrp SYSTEM /var/cron/tabs/Administrator
>>        Please check your crontab's group membership, and
>>        run this script again. 
>

> I wouldn't recommend this procedure.  Better to run getfacl/setfacl to
> solve the problem of the extra permissions access.
> 
> You're also using W2K3.  The LocalSystem (SYSTEM) account on W2K3 doesn't
> have the permissions necessary to switch user contexts, which is necessary
> to run cron in the traditional way.  Since you've already configured and
> installed OpenSSH, you can use the sshd_server as the user account for the
> cron service as well.  sshd_server has the necessary permissions to switch
> user contexts.  Doing this though will likely mean that the files you
> changed to be owned by SYSTEM need to have their ownerships changed to
> sshd_server.  Rerunning cron_diagnose will likely catch other files that
> need to have the ownership changed.  But use sshd_server in place of
> SYSTEM.
> 
> You may want to update your cygwin package as well.
> 
> This may not be enough to solve all your problems but it's not obvious to
> me where other problems may be but this should be a start.
> 

Let me point out again that cron_diagnose does not handle W2K3 at all
and that cron-config should be used instead. 
Much of the cron related traffic to this list is due to misguided attempts 
to use cron_diagnose.

Pierre

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