Using CentOS 5 on my VPS, I recently found that newly created cPanel accounts running cPanel/WHM 11.24 RELEASE seemed to have some trouble properly setting permissions to allow the jailshell cPanel users to access/manage their crontab.
Setting up cron jobs via cPanel’s web interface itself worked just fine, but when trying to manage a jailshell users crontab via shell, the permissions were not set up properly to allow for this.
As d4ly you can see I don’t have permission to view/edit the crontab for d4ly
d4ly@d4ly.com [~]# crontab -e
cron/d4ly: Permission denied
So as root I did the following
root@server [~]# chmod 4775 /usr/bin/crontab
root@server [~]# cd /var/spool/cron
root@server [/var/spool/cron]# chmod 0755 .
root@server [/var/spool/cron]# chown d4ly.d4ly. d4ly
root@server [/var/spool/cron]# ls -l
total 24
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 4 17:03 ./
drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 4096 Sep 9 09:51 ../
-rw------- 1 d4ly d4ly 37 Feb 4 14:54 d4ly
-rw------- 1 root root 1555 Jan 19 20:52 mailman
-rw------- 1 root root 32 Jan 11 16:42 munin
-rw------- 1 root root 485 Jan 26 13:17 root
Then I tested things out once more as d4ly
d4ly@d4ly.com [~]# crontab -e
MAILTO="d4ly"
0 0 * * * ping d4ly.com # This cron is for testing jailshell crontab editing
