We have just updated to Fedora 12 and have noticed that some cron jobs are failing to run with errors like Jan 10 04:30:02 myhost crond[15769]: (CRON) ERROR chdir failed (/home/filehost/misc/username): Permission denied Jan 10 04:30:02 myhost crond[15769]: (username) ERROR (failed to change user) This user has a home directory mounted via NFS from a file server with permissions drwx------. What I think is happening is that cron is trying to change to the user's home directory as root, which fails because root doesn't have permissions to access that directory. It does however work if the permissions are drwx-----x. but changing these permissions potentially reduces the security of the directory. So what should be happening is that cron should be running as the user before it tries to access the home directory.
Right, thank you for thorough report. The fix will be available in next update.
cronie-1.4.3-3.fc12 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 12. http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/cronie-1.4.3-3.fc12
The problem looks to be fixed in cronie-1.4.3-3.fc12 from koji.