One day you notice you cannot access the crontab for a particular user on an Oracle Linux system. The messages are when “crontab -l” is executed:

Authentication token is no longer valid; new one required
You (user) are not allowed to access to (crontab) because of pam configuration.

If nothing has changed on this system, it’s likely the password for this user has expired. To check it, run the following command:

root@testjlidb:/# chage -l oracle
Last password change : Mar 12, 2019
Password expires : Mar 11, 2020
Password inactive : never
Account expires : never
Minimum number of days between password change : 1
Maximum number of days between password change : 365
Number of days of warning before password expires : 7

As you can see the 2nd line showing the expire date. So you need to change the password for this user or set the password to never expire which might raise a security concern.

root@testjlidb:/# chage -M -1 oracle
root@testjlidb:/# chage -l oracle
Last password change : Mar 12, 2019
Password expires : never
Password inactive : never
Account expires : never
Minimum number of days between password change : 1
Maximum number of days between password change : -1
Number of days of warning before password expires : 7

If the password doesn’t expire, the next place to check is /etc/security/access.conf which controls the login access including cron.

• Linux