Hello, Gentooers, I have 3 amd64 Gentoo systems. Somewhat different hardware, but all running the same Gentoo profile, same world file, same /etc/portage. All up to date, all using the same binpkgs for all installed hardware. At least as far as I can tell. I don't have a robust mechanism for enforcing consistency among the machines, but I try to maintain them as identically as possible. Little differences sneak in.
I've been using fcron for years, and I rarely need to touch it. Recently I discovered that it works differently on the 3 machines. Only for my personal user account "john", but not for root. On 1 machine, fcrontab -e works as expected for "john". On the other 2, it generates this error when invoked: ERROR Could not init PAM account management (9): Authentication service cannot retrieve authentication info This message comes from inside fcrontab. The source code indicates that it occurs from a failure of a call to pam_acct_mgmt(). That's the part of the pam interface which checks for a valid account. The "john" account has no other pam issues. It's the account I have used for all normal activity for the 20+ years I've used Gentoo. It has the same /etc/passwd and /etc/group entries on all machines. /etc/pamd.d is identical on all machines: content, timestamps, and ownership included. So, I'm at a loss for what to examine next. I'm thinking that atching what pam does on the working/nonworking machines may provide some clues. There's a pam_debug module that I assume is written to do just this. But I find the man page confusing, and Google sheds more darkness than light. Can anyone explain how they debug pam problems? Thanks, John