Bug 1169175

Summary:	Can't remove crontab from expired accounts
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7	Reporter:	John Newbigin <jn>
Component:	cronie	Assignee:	Tomas Mraz <tmraz>
Status:	CLOSED ERRATA	QA Contact:	Karel Volný <kvolny>
Severity:	low	Docs Contact:
Priority:	low
Version:	7.0	CC:	kvolny, todoleza
Target Milestone:	rc
Target Release:	7.4
Hardware:	Unspecified
OS:	Unspecified
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:	cronie-1.4.11-16.el7	Doc Type:	If docs needed, set a value
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Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2017-08-01 12:22:34 UTC	Type:	Bug
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description John Newbigin 2014-12-01 00:11:23 UTC

Description of problem:
There is no method to remove the crontab of an expired account

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
cronie-1.4.4-12.el6.x86_64

How reproducible:
Every time

Steps to Reproduce:
1. useradd crontest
2. echo '* * * * * echo test' | crontab -u crontest -
3. chage -E 1 crontest
4. crontab -u crontest -r

Actual results:
User account has expired
You (crontest) are not allowed to access to (crontab) because of pam configuration.

Expected results:
(No output = success) It is expected that root can list, edit, delete all crontabs at any time.

Additional info:
Seems to be a design flaw in the way PAM is used by crontab.
Because crond and crontab use the same PAM config, it is not safe to add a uid=0 check.

There may be another easy way to configure PAM to enable this.

As a workaround, the account can be un-expired. This is not desirable because the cronjob may run between the user being un-expired and the crontab being removed.

Comment 2 Tomas Mraz 2014-12-01 11:56:16 UTC

crontab should simply bypass the PAM checks if run as root.

Comment 3 Tomas Mraz 2014-12-01 12:00:20 UTC

The proper workaround is to remove the crontab directly with rm.
'rm /var/spool/cron/crontest'

Comment 4 Tomas Mraz 2016-06-09 12:00:09 UTC

Moving to RHEL-7.

Comment 8 errata-xmlrpc 2017-08-01 12:22:34 UTC

Since the problem described in this bug report should be
resolved in a recent advisory, it has been closed with a
resolution of ERRATA.

For information on the advisory, and where to find the updated
files, follow the link below.

If the solution does not work for you, open a new bug report.

https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2017:2061