Nagios Support Forum

So I had the mis-fortune of having a problem with one of my Nagios XI servers today where applying configuration would hang infinitely. I'm posting this to share how I fixed it so that hopefully someone doesn't bang their head on the desk like I did.


- Verified that the /etc/php.ini settings were configured as mentioned in this article: http://support.nagios.com/wiki/index.ph ... leshooting
- Verified the age of the password of my nagios user: sudo chage -l nagios
Last password change : May 19, 2013
Password expires : never
Password inactive : never
Account expires : Jan 20, 11761191
Minimum number of days between password change : 0
Maximum number of days between password change : 99999
Number of days of warning before password expires : 7


- Verified that the permissions on the /usr/local/nagiosxi folder structure were set properly based on this forum entry: http://support.nagios.com/forum/viewtop ... =6&t=21972
- Verified that crond was running
- Attempted restarting crond just for good measure
- Attempted to run crontab -l as nagios user <~~~~SPARK OF BRILLIANCE
This lead me to look in the /var/log/cron file for errors which showed this:
Apr 28 15:56:01 atxentlnag-p01 crond[1706]: (nagios) FAILED to authorize user with PAM (Permission denied)


In order to fix this, I added the nagios user to /etc/cron.allow and edited /etc/pam.d/crond to include the following line:
account sufficient pam_listfile.so item=user sense=allow file=/etc/cron.allow onerr=succeed

Then I restarted crond, and voila, Nagios XI (via CCM) can now apply configuration.

Happy Monitoring!

Thanks for posting your solution!

I also found a post that said that you should just restart your cron daemon if you experience that, did you try that?

Yup, but as you can see in the error log, it wasn't a matter of cron needing to be restarted, it was literally a matter of the user not having permissions. I should have mentioned that, my bad. I'll update the post. Thanks for pointing that out!

Ok, thanks for updating, I'm going to mark this as resolved and lock the topic.