On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 9:29 PM, Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards@gmail.com> wrote:
On a newly installed system, I'm getting error messages from vixie cron
about PAM authentication errors:

Feb 25 09:52:01 alpha crond[23085]: (root) PAM ERROR (Authentication failure)
Feb 25 09:52:01 alpha crond[23085]: (root) FAILED to authorize user with PAM (Authentication failure)
Feb 25 09:53:01 alpha cron[23118]: (root) CMD (echo "cron ran at $(date)" >>/tmp/cron.out)
Feb 25 09:53:01 alpha crond[23122]: (root) PAM ERROR (Authentication failure)
Feb 25 09:53:01 alpha crond[23122]: (root) FAILED to authorize user with PAM (Authentication failure)
Feb 25 09:54:01 alpha cron[23153]: (root) CMD (echo "cron ran at $(date)" >>/tmp/cron.out)
Feb 25 09:54:01 alpha crond[23157]: (root) PAM ERROR (Authentication failure)
Feb 25 09:54:01 alpha crond[23157]: (root) FAILED to authorize user with PAM (Authentication failure)
Feb 25 09:55:01 alpha cron[23160]: (root) CMD (echo "cron ran at $(date)" >>/tmp/cron.out)
Feb 25 09:55:01 alpha crond[23164]: (root) PAM ERROR (Authentication failure)
Feb 25 09:55:01 alpha crond[23164]: (root) FAILED to authorize user with PAM (Authentication failure)

AFAICT, it runs the scheduled command except for the very first time.

I get the same results with normal user's crontab entries.

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Sounds like a pam configuration error. Try this? http://www.shanison.com/2012/02/08/crontab-error-failed-to-open-pam-security-session-success/
There are a couple of other blogs too on Google search, but all of them describe 'security error'. Your's seems to be different.