[Bug 27520] [NEW] cron daemon caches user-non-existent lookup results, causing "ORPHAN" message and skipping jobs for all LDAP/NIS-defined users

[Launchpad Bug Tracker]

You have been subscribed to a public bug by Adam Stokes (adam-stokes):

== SRU Justification ==

* Impact: users being defined on remote user databases such as LDAP will
not be able to access to their cron jobs and these will be marked as
orphaned unless cron is restarted. The impact is severe for users
relying on cron and using LDAP.

* Fix:
  The fix was implemented in Fedora's cronie. It implements a list orphan which allows to describe jobs as being orphaned or not depending on whether the owner is found or not.

* Test case: 
  How to reproduce:
     1. Setup an LDAP remote directory and add a user to test.
     2. Create a crontab for this user with some jobs.
     3. When a reboot happens, this user will have its jobs orphaned.
  Expected results:
     - the cron table is read and jobs are to be executed when required.
  Actual results:
     - the cron table / jobs are marked as orphaned.

* Regression potential: very minimal, the fix only adds a list adding a
new description to the jobs, these are described as orphans and are
checked when necessary.

* Original bug description:

We had a server which was happily running Hoary. It authenticated to our AD2003
domain using winbind, and winbind was in the nsswitch.conf. However, after
upgrading to Breezy, cron no longer works properly, in that it doesn't respect
accounts from winbind as being valid accounts. My logs are filling up with
messages like:

Dec 22 09:52:01 thorin /usr/sbin/cron[28207]: (user1) ORPHAN (no passwd entry)
Dec 22 09:52:01 thorin /usr/sbin/cron[28207]: (user2) ORPHAN (no passwd entry)
Dec 22 09:55:01 thorin /usr/sbin/cron[28207]: (user3) ORPHAN (no passwd entry)
Dec 22 09:55:01 thorin /usr/sbin/cron[28207]: (user4) ORPHAN (no passwd entry)

If you do "id user1", their information shows up perfectly fine, so it seems
like cron has been changed to not respect this source of information.

** Affects: cron (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Medium
         Status: Fix Released

** Affects: cron (Ubuntu Lucid)
     Importance: Medium
         Status: Triaged

** Affects: cron (Ubuntu Maverick)
     Importance: Medium
         Status: Triaged

** Affects: cron (Ubuntu Natty)
     Importance: Medium
         Status: Triaged

** Affects: cron (Debian)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: Fix Released

-- 
cron daemon caches user-non-existent lookup results, causing "ORPHAN" message and skipping jobs for all LDAP/NIS-defined users
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/27520
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Sponsors Team, which is subscribed to the bug report.