Controlling Access to the cron and at Commands

Scheduling is so powerful that you as an administrator don't necessarily want your users to be able to have complete access to the cron and at commands. Let's say, for instance, that you have a troublesome user who insists upon running an IRC “eggdrop” bot, and every time you kill the process, it keeps coming back—because the user has set up a crontab file to restart the process if it's not running (checking every hour, for example). The user doesn't respond to email. Your options are either to disable the user's account (a fairly barbaric and messy option) or to restrict the user's access to the cron and at commands. This is done through the deny and allow files for both programs.

Normally, /var/cron/allow ...

Get FreeBSD® Unleashed now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.