crontab error : “You (user) are not allowed to access to (crontab) because of pam configuration.”

Issue

crontab -l command fails with the following error.

# crontab -l
You (user) are not allowed to access to (crontab) because of pam configuration.

Solution

There could be 2 reasons for this error :
1. Expired password for the user
2. user not allowed access to cron in /etc/security/access.conf file.

 

Allow user to access cron resource in /etc/security/access.conf file

1. Another issue could be that the user is not allowed to use the cron resources in /etc/security/access.conf file. In that case you can allow the user cron access by adding below line in the file /etc/security/access.conf. Usually this line is hashed by default.

# vi /etc/security/access.conf
# User "root" should be allowed to get access via cron .. tty5 tty6.
+ : user : cron crond :0 tty1 tty2 tty3 tty4 tty5 tty6