crontab: you are not authorized to use the cron command

[Scott Woods]

Hi all,

I've been having a really hard time trying to figure out why no user
(including root) can use any cron/at commands on our RS6000s or SP
nodes (all AIX 4.3.3):

# crontab -l
crontab: 0481-109 You are not authorized to use the cron command.

The cron daemon runs, but scheduled jobs do not get run; they fail
with the same message, which is received by email.

Here's a quick rundown of the current setup. Please let me know if I'm
leaving out any other information that I should be looking at:

/var/adm/cron/cron.deny contains the default 3 newlines, nothing else.
/var/adm/cron/cron.allow does not exist.

# which crontab
/usr/bin/crontab
# ls -l /usr/bin/crontab /usr/sbin/cron
-r-sr-sr-x 1 root cron 28486 Feb 11 2000 /usr/bin/crontab
-r-s--S--- 1 root cron 39602 Feb 11 2000 /usr/sbin/cron
# ls -l /var/adm/cron/cron*
-rw-r----- 1 bin cron 3 Sep 30 1997 /var/adm/cron/cron.deny

# grep cron /etc/group
cron:!:8:root
# grpck -n cron
# usrck -n root
#

# lsauthent
Kerberos 4
Standard Aix

Things I've tried, none of which changed the behavior:
* many many permutations of cron.allow/deny, including things that
should and shouldn't work according to the man pages.
* bos.rte.cron.4.3.3.1 and 4.3.3.50
* changing authent to just Standard
* countless irrelevant things that didn't surprise me when they
made no difference.

This is consistent across all of my machines, and it's not a new
development (unfortunately I can't go figure out what changed). This
has been an issue almost since day 1 of the installation. Any help
would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
-- Scott
--
--------------------------------
Scott A. Woods
Penn State University
EMS Environment Institute
+1 814 865 1177
lq20l8o...@sneakemail.com

[Nicholas Dronen]

Scott Woods <lq20l8o...@sneakemail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,

> I've been having a really hard time trying to figure out why no user
> (including root) can use any cron/at commands on our RS6000s or SP
> nodes (all AIX 4.3.3):

> # crontab -l
> crontab: 0481-109 You are not authorized to use the cron command.

# chuser daemon=true username