I host a sunfreeware mirror which I cronned to be updates every night at 06:00. However I noticed some weeks ago that this didn't happen automatically. To lame to find a solution for it I just manual updated it sometimes.

But after setting up the crontab for my debian mirror (which is hosted on a other company machine which is running Debian) I decided it would be time to fix the crontab entry on solaris.

After some research I found out that Solaris logs crontab messages to /var/cron/log (which is actually pretty predictable logging for Solaris). The log entries for the updating of the sunfreeware mirror looked something like this:

> CMD: /usr/local/bin/update-sunfreeware
> ftp 21022 c Fri Jul 30 06:00:00 2004
! bad user (ftp) Fri Jul 30 06:00:00 2004

So we are talking about a bad user here. Well actually the user is all there and running in /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow. But hey wait, the FTP account is locked. Well I found that normal behaviour, but guess what, crontab expects a password there, else the account is not good and is a bad user!

So I've created an additional account called 'mirror' to setup the mirroring and yes this account does carry an password to let the crontab do it's work.

Maybe it's time to setup some more automatic mirroring scripts for the rest of the mirrored software on polaris.