Kevin O'Gorman wrote: > I have a small number of logins on my gentoo box that I use for > automated chores. > I would prefer that they never have passwords, since they are run > solely by cron jobs. > However, if the login is locked then cron will no longer run the jobs > -- I presume > (without knowing for sure) that it's because of the warning messages > that are issued > when you 'su' into such a login. > > These logins are data gatherers for me, that send emails to other > automated systems > to get information. They process the answers in various ways for > later harvesting by > other automated processes. > > As it is, I have assigned passwords to these accounts, but as I said, > I'd prefer not to. > > SO: is there a way to get cron(1) to run jobs for an account whose password is > disabled? Perhaps by doing something to the shadow file that > passwd(1) would not > do?
Enter a ! for the password of the users in question in /etc/shadow and they're not permitted to log in though they have a shell. You can then have your root's or system's crontab starting tasks with their privileges or you can give these users their own crontabs. In the latter case these users need to be memers of the cron-group. HTH, regards Felix -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
