May 2011 Archives

Just had a problem about a crontab not being executed for a system user. In /var/cron/log the message

! bad user (cyrus) Mon May  9 08:05:00 2011

shows up.

The cure was simple: The system user "cyrus" had a locked password in /etc/shadow:

cyrus:*LK*:::::::

Cron does not like this. Just set a random password for the user and throw it away. Damn. Solaris 10 Cron does not work with "locked password"-Users.

In case you have a group of virtual machines which you want to run together on one cluster node (e.g. they are communicating much faster through an internal vmware host network) you may achieve this by a cluster rule.

Just click on "Edit Settings" on the cluster's context menu: