Cron: Permission denied on everything

Solution 1:

This was a messy problem.

I ended up adding all the users to the crontab group, and setting the group ownership of all needed files to that crontab group.

A lot of permissions were messed up. Changing the group ownership to something else first "resets" those permissions.

The crontab executable:
sudo chgrp crontab /usr/bin/crontab
sudo chmod g+s /usr/bin/crontab
Result: -rwxrwsr-x 1 root crontab 37K 2010-04-15 08:51 /usr/bin/crontab

The cron spool files:
sudo chmod 4774 -R /var/spool/cron
Result: drwsrwsr-- 5 root crontab 4,0K 2009-12-23 23:01 cron

The cron files in these spool directories need to be READ AND WRITE only. Otherwise they won't run. sudo chmod 600 /var/spool/cron/crontabs/*

The cron pid file:
sudo chmod 744 /var/run/crond.pid

I think that should cover it.

Solution 2:

The permissions for the CRON files are set to user root group root, so you'll need to be root to modify or run CRON files. Alternatively you can log in as root and change the groups to something else so you can edit it.

Solution 3:

What linux distro is this? Is there an /etc/cron.allow or /etc/cron.deny file? If so, what are their contents?

What are the permissions on /var/spool/cron/crontabs/skerit

Any user should be able to edit their own crontab.