Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Check your cron jobs...

Yesterday, a PAM security update was released. Unfortunately, it introduced a regression which caused the cron daemon to stop working with a "Module is unknown" error.

The updates were quickly pulled from the archive, and a regression fix has been released.

If you have servers or desktops configured with unattended updates, they may have gotten updated with the broken release. If so, cron jobs will have stopped and updates will no longer be automatically installed.

You may fix this problem by performing one of the following actions:
  • Rebooting your machine
  • Restarting your cron daemon ("sudo /etc/init.d/cron restart")
  • Updating to the latest PAM packages (with Update Manager, or apt-get)
This is a rather unfortunate situation, and steps have been implemented to make sure a similar issue doesn't happen with PAM updates in the future.

We apologize for the inconvenience.