cronjob for amanda not working.

[rmarquez]

Hi,

For some reason, the cron jobs I have set up for amcheck and amdump seem to have stopped working. I'm wondering if it's the syntax of the crontab or if something on the (centos) linux box I'm working with has an issue.

I set these crontab entries as root when the amandabackup's crontab stopped working:

# amanda check config for issues
0 16 * * * su amandabackup -c /usr/sbin/amcheck -m adready.local
# amanda run backup (will automatically make full and incremental)
30 16 * * * su amandabackup -c /usr/sbin/amdump adready.local

original crontab entries as amandabackup:

0 18 * * * /usr/sbin/amcheck -m adready.local
15 0 * * * /usr/sbin/amdump adready.local


The last attempted runs had this result from /var/log/cron:

Feb 26 18:00:01 hqadmin02 crond[13978]: CRON (amandabackup) ERROR: failed to open PAM security session: Bad file descriptor
Feb 26 18:00:01 hqadmin02 crond[13978]: CRON (amandabackup) ERROR: cannot set security context
Feb 27 00:15:01 hqadmin02 crond[3764]: CRON (amandabackup) ERROR: failed to open PAM security session: Bad file descriptor
Feb 27 00:15:01 hqadmin02 crond[3764]: CRON (amandabackup) ERROR: cannot set security context
Feb 27 18:00:02 hqadmin02 crond[2476]: CRON (amandabackup) ERROR: failed to open PAM security session: Bad file descriptor
Feb 27 18:00:02 hqadmin02 crond[2476]: CRON (amandabackup) ERROR: cannot set security context
Feb 28 00:15:01 hqadmin02 crond[24572]: CRON (amandabackup) ERROR: failed to open PAM security session: Bad file descriptor
Feb 28 00:15:01 hqadmin02 crond[24572]: CRON (amandabackup) ERROR: cannot set security context

If I ps aux | grep amdump, there's no instance of it, so I'm getting the impression that something is wrong with the cron syntax.

[aorth]

Hi,

For some reason, the cron jobs I have set up for amcheck and amdump seem to have stopped working. I'm wondering if it's the syntax of the crontab or if something on the (centos) linux box I'm working with has an issue.

I set these crontab entries as root when the amandabackup's crontab stopped working:

# amanda check config for issues
0 16 * * * su amandabackup -c /usr/sbin/amcheck -m adready.local
# amanda run backup (will automatically make full and incremental)
30 16 * * * su amandabackup -c /usr/sbin/amdump adready.local

original crontab entries as amandabackup:

0 18 * * * /usr/sbin/amcheck -m adready.local
15 0 * * * /usr/sbin/amdump adready.local


The last attempted runs had this result from /var/log/cron:

Feb 26 18:00:01 hqadmin02 crond[13978]: CRON (amandabackup) ERROR: failed to open PAM security session: Bad file descriptor
Feb 26 18:00:01 hqadmin02 crond[13978]: CRON (amandabackup) ERROR: cannot set security context
Feb 27 00:15:01 hqadmin02 crond[3764]: CRON (amandabackup) ERROR: failed to open PAM security session: Bad file descriptor
Feb 27 00:15:01 hqadmin02 crond[3764]: CRON (amandabackup) ERROR: cannot set security context
Feb 27 18:00:02 hqadmin02 crond[2476]: CRON (amandabackup) ERROR: failed to open PAM security session: Bad file descriptor
Feb 27 18:00:02 hqadmin02 crond[2476]: CRON (amandabackup) ERROR: cannot set security context
Feb 28 00:15:01 hqadmin02 crond[24572]: CRON (amandabackup) ERROR: failed to open PAM security session: Bad file descriptor
Feb 28 00:15:01 hqadmin02 crond[24572]: CRON (amandabackup) ERROR: cannot set security context

If I ps aux | grep amdump, there's no instance of it, so I'm getting the impression that something is wrong with the cron syntax.

So the cron jobs work when you run them as root?

One quick thing to check: make sure the amandabackup user has a valid shell. It can't run cron jobs unless its using a valid shell. The default for daemon users is to give them an invalid shell (for security reasons), but in this case you'll need to change that. Look in /etc/passwd and see if the shell for the Amanda user is something like /bin/false; change it to /bin/bash.

The PAM messages look strange... certainly could be due to a syntax error in a file somewhere.

[jfarschman]

I had this problem some time ago and it turned out to be an authentication problem. In my case the amandabackup user was an active directory user and all I had to do was stop and start the services that bind the Redhat system to the Microsoft domain.

service smb stop
service winbind stop
service smb start
service winbind start
# Test it
wbinfo -u