Debian – cron+pam heavily spamming the logs

crondebianpam

Two times every minute I get this in auth.log:

May 12 15:21:01 ruptai CRON[25303]: pam_unix(cron:session): session opened for user root by (uid=0)
May 12 15:21:01 ruptai CRON[25303]: pam_unix(cron:session): session closed for user root

This never stops, two times every minute, every minute of every day.

I've no idea what it is, I would just to stop it from pointless logging this stuff. This has been going on for ages so I can't recall when it started.

OS is debian stable.

Btw, I've found questions on google but no answers

Update:

On /etc/pam.d/ there are, among other things, four files named common-* that are included by the others.

common-auth:

auth    required        pam_unix.so md5

common-account:

account required        pam_unix.so md5

common-session:

session required        pam_unix.so md5

common-password:

password   required   pam_unix.so nullok obscure min=4 max=8 md5

(I tried adding that line to common-session but to no avail)

Best Answer

Javier gave a Debian specific answer there: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=293272#36

I added this at the beginning of /etc/pam.d/cron on a Lenny system and it worked (I restarted cron but I don't know if that was necessary):

session     [success=1 default=ignore] pam_succeed_if.so service in cron quiet use_uid
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