Cron, chroot, jails, and permissions

Question

I'm trying to grasp how to run crons under chrooted users.

I'm on Ubuntu, and using ISPConfig where I can.

I created a cronjob in ISPConfig which resulted in a file /etc/cron.d/ispc_chrooted_web1 with:

MAILTO=''
SHELL='/usr/sbin/jk_chrootsh'
*/2     *       *       *       *       web1    /etc/cron.d/job1

But the job isn't getting run.

So I'm wondering:

1) What is actually calling this file? I don't see any log errors so it's hard to track down what's wrong.

But, I'm assuming this user doesn't have necessary permissions. But what user is it, a new jailed user, or the user web1?? Which leads to question two:

2) What exactly is that SHELL line is doing?

and finally.

3) How can I start to narrow down what's keeping this from running, and how do I go about setting the necessary permissions? Does the web1 user just need access to execute the job1 file?

I commented out the SHELL line and it still didn't run.

Answer 1

Can you clarify a little? If you chroot a user and you expect that user to execute commands you have to provide the correct subdirectories to use. You did not specify but I am going to start there.

Step 1 more info. What have you provided the chrooted user to work with?

Also there are some very good writeups on using chrooted ssh users. This would require a very similar setup. I would start your config with that.

If you have already done this I apologize, as I may be well off base :D please give us more detail.