Not all aspects of this PAM failure can be fixed easily, since daemons other than cron were also affected. Cron can be restarted without user impact, but something like xdm cannot be.
(Since we got hurt by the xdm issue, not by the cron issue, I am rather sensitive about this.) I personally think that we were quite lucky that the Ubuntu sshd was not affected by this, although it uses PAM. (I am not sure why it was unaffected, since sshd has libpam loaded and requires pam_env.so in a normal Ubuntu config.) I also hope that Ubuntu will conduct a real root cause analysis on this. 'Cron locked up after a PAM upgrade' is only the surface problem and addressing and detecting just it would be only addressing the most obvious symptom of the real problem. The real problem was 'a PAM update was not ABI compatible'; the broken processes were simply a symptom of this. I would like Ubuntu to change things so that they detect this if it happens again, not merely instances of the root cause where cron helpfully locks up. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/790538 Title: pam update causes cron to stop working with "Module is unknown" error -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
