Dealing with cron bad user messages on Solaris hosts

While reviewing the cron logs on one of my Solaris hosts, I noticed a number of entries similar to the following:

CMD: /opt/software/bin/arrecord -backup
> arr 20359 c Thu Sep 3 23:45:00 2009
! bad user (arr) Thu Sep 3 23:45:00 2009
< arr 20359 c Thu Sep 3 23:45:00 2009 rc=1

These errors are typically generated when the account the job run as doesn’t exist, or when the user’s shadow entry is locked (locked accounts have a *LK* in the /etc/shadow password field). In this specific case a password or NP entry (the account doesn’t have a password, and logins are denied) wasn’t assigned to the arr user, so the account was still listed in the locked state. Setting a strong password fixed the issue, and everything is working swimmingly!

One Comment

jasarek  on December 23rd, 2010

Hello,

I get rc=9 when my cron runs but when I run it manually, it works fine

CMD: /soft/www/footprints/cgi/MRRunScheduledScripts.pl >> /soft/www/footprints/temp/FPSchedule_log.txt
> root 18127 c Thu Dec 23 14:11:00 2010
< root 18127 c Thu Dec 23 14:11:03 2010 rc=9
Can you please point me in the right direction as to what is going on here.

Thanks a great deal

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