Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 167670
when invoked as root, kcron creates crontabs for all users, including NIS domain users who have never logged in, when saving any change
Last modified: 2008-08-22 08:19:47 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041215 Firefox/1.0 Red Hat/1.0-12.EL4 Description of problem: When invoked as root, the kcron utility checks for crontabs for all users who could hypothetically ever log into the system, even non-local users who would not be permitted to actually run crontab. This includes the entire NIS domain, if there is one. This is by itself annoying. If a change is made to any user, and saved, crontabs are created for all users, whether or not they are allowed to actually run crontab, have anything in their crontab, or have ever done anything at all on the system. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kdeadmin-3.3.1-2 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Run kcron as root 2. change any crontab 3. save 4. note that you now have a number of crontabs under /var/spool/cron equal to (ypcat passwd | wc -l) + (wc -l /etc/passwd), plus possibly other databases or directories as well, if applicable Actual Results: It modified the one crontab I was changing, and created ((ypcat passwd | wc -l) + (wc -l /etc/passwd) - 1) new, empty crontabs. Expected Results: kcron should have only shown local users, and should only have saved crontabs that were modified, without creating anything for users with no crontab. Perhaps a configuration option could override this, but the default behavior is not sane. Additional info: kcron as a non-root user shows only that user's crontab.
This request was evaluated by Red Hat Engineering for inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux maintenance release. Red Hat does not currently plan to provide this change in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux update release for currently deployed products. With the goal of minimizing risk of change for deployed systems, and in response to customer and partner requirements, Red Hat takes a conservative approach when evaluating enhancements for inclusion in maintenance updates for currently deployed products. The primary objectives of update releases are to enable new hardware platform support and to resolve critical defects. However, Red Hat will further review this request for potential inclusion in future major releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.