Passbolt started sending root cron messages, not sure what it means or how to stop it

#1

Since I updated the passbolt server, it started sending us weird mail.

From: (Cron Daemon) root@servername.ourdomain.com

Subject is always:

Cron root@servername su -s /bin/bash nginx $PASSBOLT_BASE_DIR/bin/cron

Email body is always like this:
Email X was sent

and sometimes it contains multiple messages in each email like:

Email 900 was sent
Email 901 was sent
Email 902 was sent
Email 903 was sent

Theres nothing in the root cron that I think is doing this…if I’m looking in the right place that is.

What should I do?

#2

Hi @pasbbolting I’m not sure what changed, but a cron file will output events as you are describing if it has no output modifiers.

Can you post the contents of the cron file? Maybe look in the /etc/cron.d folder.

#3

Oh that was easy to find… Right here’s the culprit.

Why is it spamming us at seemingly random times? Can we safely tell it to be quiet? Do we need this in order to get info about updated passwords and registrations?

[root@servername ~]# cat /etc/cron.d/passbolt-ce-server

Cronjob to process emails for the Passbolt Web Service every minute.

This crontab script is part of the Passbolt Debian package,

see dh_installcron debhelper program for more details.

PATH=/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin
PASSBOLT_BASE_DIR=/usr/share/php/passbolt

          • root su -s /bin/bash nginx $PASSBOLT_BASE_DIR/bin/cron
#4

If you add >/dev/null at the end of the cron line it will not do anything with normal output. It would output errors to email though.

However, in my opinion it is better to output to a file for logging instead of no output at all.

passbolt_api/cron.d.in at master · passbolt/passbolt_api · GitHub shows the normal output to a cron log file, and error output (file descriptor 2) to an error log.

So, back to my above suggestion, if you use it you will get emailed the errors instead of them being logged. Do whatever you think is best for your setup.

It’s possible that the update overwrote previous modifications. Something to keep in mind for the next update.

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#5

It would primarily be of interest from the view of whether or not the cron job is successfully processing pending mail jobs. If the cron task were to not work, all outgoing app mail messages would cease.

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