FreeBSD6 Unleashed

Controlling Access to the cron and at Commands

Scheduling is so powerful that most administrators don’t necessarily want their users to be able to have complete access to the cron and at commands. As an administrator, you can control access to these commands on your FreeBSD system.

Let’s say, for instance, you have a troublesome user who insists on 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 (always a possibility, unless the person is your brother-in-law or something) or to restrict the user’s ...