Faq-O-Matic Faq-O-Matic : Administrators' Guide : Troubleshoot :
crontab: you are not authorized to use cron. Sorry. | |
Many web servers run CGIs as `nobody,' and man Unix crons disallow `nobody' from scheduling cron jobs. If you are in this situation, you will get the error:crontab: you are not authorized to use cron. Sorry.when you attempt to install the cron job from the installer page. There are a couple possible fixes. The third is probably the easiest. | |
1. Arrange for the CGI to run as another user. If you do this,
see I want to change the user ID that runs the CGI..
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2. Configure your Unix to allow nobody to own cron jobs. I don't know
how to do this.
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3. Install the cron job in another account or on another machine.
All the cron job does is make an HTTP request, which in turns gives the CGI an opportunity to do its maintenance. It requires the FAQ::OMatic kit only because that was easier that requiring everybody to have some alternative package. You can emulate this from another account or another machine in several ways: 3.1. Run the same cron job from another account or machine. You just need to make sure that in the first case the other user can get to the FAQ::OMatic installation, or in the second case you've installed the FAQ::OMatic libraries on the other machine.
3.2. Make the same HTTP request from another account using different agent,
such as ftp://sailor.gutenberg.org/pub/software/lynx/lynx2-7
or http://xach.dorknet.com/snarf/
(ftp://ftp.mint.net/pub/linux/src/snarf-latest.tar.gz). Just extract the URL from the error message you got in the installer, and arrange for that URL to be accessed hourly using the other HTTP agent.
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On Solaris 2.x, examine the file /etc/cron.d/cron.deny for the user name which
is being denied. Remove that user name from the file. Probably not a big security concern on a restricted-access web server, but beware.
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