Along with Simon’s question, can you tell where cron is in the load order
relative to other things like the network? In addition, is your box using
static network configuration, or DHCP, or something that may slow down
actual acquisition of network information? If any of this is an issue you
could potentially delay cron startup by having it come later in the load
order, or by restarting it once in something like boot.local, etc.
Admittedly those are workarounds for timing issues.
Have you tried setting up the cron jobs as the user themselves? e.g. use
‘su’ to become the user and then run ‘crontab -e’ and setup the job in
there (without the user specification after the time spec) and see if that
behaves any differently.
–
Good luck.
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how are you accessing the LDAP accounts (PAM, sssd,…) and are these accounts on an OpenLDAP server or from within an AD? If it’s an OpenLDAP server, is it local to the machine?
It does sound as if the account is not available when crond is started - i.e. because of a not yet established access path to the LDAP directory server.
If you’re using sssd, you might mitigate the effect by activating account caching. If using PAM directly, you might look into your nscd configuration to establish the same effect.