Bug 28918

Summary:	Root crontab HOME=/ confuses some programs
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	rbulling
Component:	crontabs	Assignee:	Jason Vas Dias <jvdias>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	Brock Organ <borgan>
Severity:	low	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	7.0	CC:	dr, jr-redhatbugs2
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2004-08-10 22:03:27 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description rbulling 2001-02-22 20:26:11 UTC

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)


Root's crontab, /etc/crontab, defines HOME to be "/". This can cause
some programs difficulty, for example autorpm 
<http://www.kaybee.org/~kirk/html/linux.html>. Root's actual home 
directory is "/root". Maybe /etc/crontab should define it that way.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. As root, import the RPM PGP keys from /usr/doc/rpm-xx 
2. Install Autorpm & configure /etc/autorpm.d/redhat-updates for automatic 
updates, with PGP signature checking
3. Let autorpm run from cron 
	

Actual Results:  autorpm will fail to verify the signatures on the RPMs. 
However, when you log in as root and run autorpm manually with 'autorpm --
apply', it will be able to verify the signatures.


Expected Results:  Autorpm should have been able to invoke gpg seamlessly 
to check the validity of the packages.

This fails because when autorpm tries to run gpg, HOME=/. When gpg was run 
earlier, it used HOME=/root to do its work. gpg will create a
new, empty /.gnupg directory when run from cron, but it will not contain 
root's actual .gnupg directory.

Red Hat should consider changing crontab's HOME to /root instead of /, 
unless this is considered a security flaw. This exists on at least Red Hat 
7.0 and 6.2.

Comment 1 Bill Nottingham 2001-02-23 04:59:33 UTC

This was actually switched to / a few releases back. I don't recall why off the
top of my head, but there was a reason. Will have to check into it.

Comment 2 Jordan Russell 2002-03-25 18:34:13 UTC

FYI, this problem also impacts the MySQL package, last I checked. In order for 
the log rotate script to find the password file, I had to symlink /.my.cnf -
> /root/.my.cnf

Comment 3 Jason Vas Dias 2004-08-10 22:03:27 UTC

 To fix this "problem", simply prepend:
    HOME=/root
 to your cron job, so the cron job would look like:
 * 12 * * *  root HOME=/root autorpm
 or similar.
 We do not want whatever happens to be in 
  ~root/{.login,.profile,.bashrc}
 to affect all cron jobs.