Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Date: Sun, 7 Jul 2002 17:34:09 -0700 From: David MacMahon To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Subject: cron and NT domains Message-ID: <20020707173409.A1652@SmartSC.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.22.1i I've been trying to get Cygwin cron to work and I ran into some "can't switch user context" problems. After reading many messages in the archives and trying all of the suggested settings, it finally dawned on me what is happening. I haven't seen this explanation in the archives, so I'm sending this in the hopes that it will prevent others from getting too frustrated. I think this really belongs in Cygwin's README for cron. cron tries to "switch user context WITHOUT a password" before running the commands in a user's crontab file. The problem, I think, is that cron is running as a service under the "LocalSystem" user and as such it cannot "switch user context WITHOUT a password" to a domain user (that would be a huge security hole). Other cygwin programs (e.g. telnet and ftp) do not have this problem because they do not "switch user context WITHOUT a password". The user provides the password to these programs interactively so they can "switch user context WITH a password" (even to an NT domain user). Unfortunately, cron is non-interactive so there is no password available for it to use when switching user context. Here's how I verified this theory: When logged in to NT using my domain account, cron kept putting the "can't switch user context" error into event viewer. As soon as I renamed "/var/cron/tabs/" to "/var/cron/tabs/" (where "" is a user local to my NT box, not part of a domain), cron worked fine. The simplest workaround is to not setup a crontab if you are logged in as a domain user (duh). If you want to use cron, setup a local NT and cygwin user and do all your cron stuff from that local account. If I'm wrong and there is a way to get cron to run crontabs for domain users, please let me know how. Dave -- David MacMahon, President Smart Software Consulting http://www.smartsc.com -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/