fcron

NielDK's picture
Submitted by NielDK on Wed, 2014/05/28 - 23:57
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Fcron is a periodical command scheduler which aims at replacing Vixie Cron, so it implements most of its functionalities.

But fcron makes no assumptions on whether your system is running all the time or regularly : you can, for instance, tell fcron to execute tasks every x hours y minutes of system up time or to do a job only once in a specified interval of time.

Fcron has also much more functionalities : you can also set a nice value to a job, run it depending on the system load average and much more !

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Application versions: 
AttachmentSizeDate
File fcron-3.0.6-3.armv7hl.rpm186.56 KB28/05/2014 - 23:57
File fcron-3.0.6-2.armv7hl.rpm188.27 KB08/04/2014 - 12:02
File fcron-3.0.6-1.armv7hl.rpm188.15 KB06/04/2014 - 22:49
Changelog: 

- Initial Sailfish OS build

Comments

istiophorus's picture

istiophorus

Wed, 2014/06/11 - 20:11

I've just installed fcron and it seems that I cannot create a cron job for a regular user (in my case "nemo"). It works fine for root, but I would like to run a specific job as a non-root user. 

I use the command

fcrontab -e

to create a cronjob, but I get this error message when I try to save the file:

could not open file nemo.orig.tmp: Permission denied

I have even added the user "nemo" to the group crontab in /etc/group, but that doesn't help.

The permissions for the executables are as follows:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 crontab crontab    17 2014-06-11 10:58 /usr/bin/crontab -> /usr/bin/fcrontab
---s--s--x 1 crontab crontab 23740 2014-05-28 21:51 /usr/bin/fcrondyn
-rws--x--x 1 root    root    14992 2014-05-28 21:51 /usr/bin/fcronsighup
---s--s--x 1 crontab crontab 47360 2014-05-28 21:51 /usr/bin/fcrontab

The permissions in the spool area are:

drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 26 2014-06-11 17:40 /var/spool/cron/

and

-rw------- 1 root root    150 2014-06-11 17:22 /var/spool/cron/root
-rw------- 1 root crontab 203 2014-06-11 16:37 /var/spool/cron/root.orig

 

The file /etc/pam.d/fcron looks like this:

auth       sufficient   pam_rootok.so
auth       include      system-auth
account    include      system-auth
password   include      system-auth
session    include      system-auth

What am I doing wrong?

 

 

NielDK's picture

NielDK

Wed, 2014/06/11 - 20:43

thanks for brunging this to my attention, I will (soon) update the package.

You can fix this issue by changing a few permission (as root , in terminal)

chown crontab:crontab /var/spool/cron
chmod 6770 /var/spool/cron
chown  crontab:crontab /var/spool/cron/*

NielDK's picture

NielDK

Thu, 2014/06/12 - 15:15

No

If you install from warehouse, and apply the chmod/chown it will work

istiophorus's picture

istiophorus

Thu, 2014/06/12 - 16:57

Ok, thank you!

istiophorus's picture

istiophorus

Thu, 2014/06/12 - 15:08

Thank you! Works like a charm.

What about /etc/group? Does "nemo" need to be a member in the crontab group?

 

meemorph's picture

meemorph

Tue, 2014/04/22 - 21:39

the /etc/pam.d/fcron file is a fcron config file and not a pam config file.

create a file /etc/pam.d/fcrontab like this (without <pre> </pre> = html tags):
<pre>
auth       sufficient   pam_rootok.so
auth       include      system-auth
account    include      system-auth
password   include      system-auth
session    include      system-auth
</pre>

and maybe /etc/pam.d/fcron the same.

And you can use fcrontab -e as root.

I also did a post at together.

Xiph's picture

Xiph

Wed, 2014/04/09 - 09:49

I have updated to the newer version, but the problem still remain.

Xiph's picture

Xiph

Tue, 2014/04/08 - 01:08

Can't get it to work.

I get following error message when e.g. run fcrontab -e:

Could not authenticate user using PAM (7): Authentication failure

I think it might have something to do with fcron not knowing where pam.conf is located. Did you specify any location when you compiled it for sailfish?

NielDK's picture

NielDK

Tue, 2014/04/08 - 12:03

Thanks for this feedback :)

This was due to a bug in fcron installation scripts, and is fixed in v 3.0.6-2