Bug 176423

Summary: Looped logging to syslog
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Reporter: Need Real Name <tsp>
Component: vixie-cronAssignee: Jason Vas Dias <jvdias>
Status: CLOSED DUPLICATE QA Contact: Brock Organ <borgan>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 4.0CC: tao
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Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i686   
OS: Linux   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2006-01-17 19:40:59 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Need Real Name 2005-12-22 15:59:53 UTC 
From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)

Description of problem:
Every five minutes cron wakes up, it logs authentication (PAM) actions to syslog. The root in this time not login to the system.
This message repeat every 5 minutes (with different PID):

Feb 20 11:30:01 seta crond(pam_unix)[4497]: session opened for user root by (uid=0)
Feb 20 11:30:01 seta crond(pam_unix)[4500]: session opened for user root by (uid=0)
Feb 20 11:30:01 seta crond(pam_unix)[4497]: session closed for user root
Feb 20 11:30:01 seta crond(pam_unix)[4500]: session closed for user root

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
vixie-cron-4.1-36.EL4  

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.install RHEL 4.0 update 2
2.login to the system
3.tail -f /var/log/secure
  

Additional info:

it looks like
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2005-February/msg06858.html
Comment 1 Jason Vas Dias 2006-01-17 19:40:59 UTC 
For each cron job, cron opens a PAM session, to permit audit logging and 
authentication control with PAM .

You can disable the generation of these PAM session messages as indicated in
bug 173926 - edit the /etc/pam.d/crond file to read:
  
 #
# The PAM configuration file for the cron daemon
#
#
auth       sufficient pam_rootok.so
auth       required   pam_stack.so service=system-auth
auth       required   pam_env.so
account    required   pam_stack.so service=system-auth
account    required   pam_access.so
#session    required   pam_stack.so service=system-auth
session    required   pam_loginuid.so

This will prevent the PAM session log messages being generated for each 
cron job .
Some users may consider the cron PAM session messages useful, and the
/etc/pam.d/crond file is user configurable - so disabling the 
cron PAM session log messages is a user configuration choice, and 
should not be the default.


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 173926 ***