Wednesday 21 November 2007

"Bad user" on Solaris 10 crontab

An account used for an application could not run its cron jobs. In /var/cron/log all I could see was:

! bad user (wondapp) Tue Nov 13 03:23:00 2007

I checked /etc/cron.allow (which didn't exist) and the user's shell in /etc/passwd but the problem turned out to be in /etc/shadow. The user was listed as:

wondapp:*LK*:::::::

This was because a password was never set for it. I just edited it to read:

wondapp:NP:::::::

Which still doesn't make a valid password but doesn't lock-out the account either. Cron jobs for wondapp work now.

11 comments:

Mike Hardy said...

just saved me some wasted time, many thanks

Anonymous said...

ditto

Anonymous said...

thanks good sugestion

Anonymous said...

Thanks. Saved me a bunch of time.

bparish said...

Thank you!

Jay_Unix said...

Thanks, save me a lot of time

Jay_Unix said...

Thanks, saveed me a lot of time

Anonymous said...

wow, excellent dude.

Anonymous said...

Don't remove this page, it's still useful!

sonic said...

This was tripping me up on SunOS 5.9. Thanks for posting this.

Anonymous said...

Thanks, that works very well!