/var/cron permissions

[Michael Adler <adler at glimpser dot org>]

>> I looked at the nt permissions of the /var/cron/tab direct and it is
>> only modifiable by the user SYSTEM, while on a machine with a well
>> working cron, that directory is modifiable by the Administrator's group
>> ( of which, the user 'eagle' is a member).

> Just change the permissions to 1755.

>> The other note is that there is a user 'S-1-0-0' which the OS doesn't
>> seem to recognize, since it puts a red question mark on the icon.

> It's created by Cygwin to implement POSIX bits not available in
> NT ACLs.


That solution did not work, but I did find out the problem.

Immediately following installation, if I start the cron daemon as the
SYSTEM user (without specifying a user):

cygrunsrv --install cron --path /usr/sbin/cron --args -D --env CYGWIN="ntsec" --disp "CYGWIN cron"

Then the /var/cron directories are created and owned by the SYSTEM user.
So, when a user tries to create crontab entry, it fails because they don't
have permission in those directories, and since they are not the owner,
they cannot simply change the mode.

I think it would be a good idea to note in the docs that you should
execute a crontab, or manually create a /var/cron/tabs directory before
starting the cron daemon as SYSTEM. Perhaps the cron package should do
this upon installation so that it definately will have user-writable
permissions.

Thanks for the great product. I hope this is a valuable contribution.

Mike Adler



--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Bug reporting:         http://cygwin.com/bugs.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/