Comment 3 for bug 137785

Since upgrading to karmic I encountered a problem that seems to be similar to this bug:

- I had to manually "restart cron" after every reboot to get cronjobs started at all.

- I had to "restart cron" regularly to get rid of the zombies.

Today I found a solution that seems to work for me. I found this line in /etc/pam.d/common-session-noninteractive and commented it out:

session optional pam_ecryptfs.so unwrap

And voila, no more zombies, and log messages issued by "cron -L 2" indicate that cron jobs are terminating correctly. I have yet to try if cron jobs work right after a reboot. With the PAM configuration line above, I had this line in my syslog on every execution of a cron job for my user:

Feb 1 08:14:01 joda CRON[7703]: Skipping automatic eCryptfs mount

That led me to the assumption that the malfunction might have something to do with my encrypted ~/Private dir.

I don't know if there are use cases for automatically mounting encrypted directories in noninteractive sessions, so just be aware that the workaround may not be suitable for everyone.

Furthermore, I'm unsure if the bug lies in cron for not being able to deal with ecryptfs' annoying debug messages or in ecryptfs for unconditionally spitting out these messages.