So I ran into the following issue when attempting to setup a user to have cron access on a RHEL 4 box.

Oct  7 10:34:01 ‘hostname’ pam_access[20206]: access denied for user `user’ from `cron’
Oct  7 10:34:01 ‘hostname’ crond[20206]: Permission denied

First and foremost, you should know that any user that you want to be able to user cron should be added to /etc/cron.allow. Almost anyone who is familiar with Cron should already know this.

Poking around a bit on google indicated that I needed to add the following to /etc/security/access.conf

+ALL:cron crond

Make sure that the line above comes before the line below.

-:ALL:ALL

Below is the /etc/pam.d/crond file that I used

#
# The PAM configuration file for the cron daemon
#
#
auth       sufficient pam_rootok.so
auth       required   pam_stack.so service=system-auth
auth       required   pam_env.so
account    sufficient /lib/security/$ISA/pam_localuser.so
account    required   pam_stack.so service=system-auth
account    required   pam_access.so
session    required   pam_limits.so
session    required   pam_loginuid.so