Can not write to /etc/cron.d

[yerrysherry]

Hallo,

After changing the backup directory to /export (update_pgsql_node_config) and restarting the daemons, pgbackman refused to create the con file. I think, he tries to create it with his user name instead of root.

2017-12-17 22:06:19,180 [pgbackman_control][22294][INFO]: UID: 999 abd GID: 999 defined for the directory /export/pgsql_node_3/log
2017-12-17 22:06:19,187 [pgbackman_control][22294][ERROR]: Problems creating/updating the crontab file: /etc/cron.d/pgsql_node_3 - [Errno 13] Permission denied: u'/etc/cron.d/pgsql_node_3'
2017-12-17 22:06:19,200 [pgbackman_control][22294][ERROR]: Problems creating/updating the crontab file: /etc/cron.d/pgsql_node_3 - [Errno 13] Permission denied: u'/etc/cron.d/pgsql_node_3'

Regards,
Gerrit

[yerrysherry]

Hallo,

root@pgbackman:/etc/cron.d# cd /etc
root@pgbackman:/etc# chmod 777 cron.d
root@pgbackman:/etc# cd /etc/cron.d
root@pgbackman:/etc/cron.d# ls
mdadm pgsql_node_1 pgsql_node_3 popularity-contest sysstat
root@pgbackman:/etc/cron.d# ls -l
total 20
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 589 Jul 16 2014 mdadm
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 573 Dec 17 17:05 pgsql_node_1
-rw-r--r-- 1 pgbackman pgbackman 819 Dec 17 22:23 pgsql_node_3
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 190 Dec 12 14:23 popularity-contest
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 396 Jan 27 2016 sysstat

Regards,
Gerrit

[ng-pe]

Hello,
using "chmod 777 /etc/cron. d" is a bad idea:
Any user of the server can create a job under any user.
Maybe an "interim" solution would be to change the group?

chown root:pgbackman /etc/cron.d
chmod 774 /etc/cron.d

It's not perfect, but it seems less permissive to me.
Yours sincerely,

[yerrysherry]

Indeed, but the owner and group of the scripts in /etc/cron.d must be root for executing the scripts. If not the scripts fail to execute. The problem is that the daemon runs as pgbackman and when he wants to write in /etc/cron.d, the daemon must have root permissions to do it.

[rafaelma]

Hello, thank you for your feedback.

This is a bug in the systemd configuration files used by pgbackman. They define user and group as pgbackman and they should be root. As ng-pe says, it is not a good idea to use chmod 777 on /etc/cron.d

This is an error in the test procedure that we will try to improve.
regards,
Rafael Martinez Guerrero