[Bug 790538] Re: pam update causes cron to stop working with "Module is unknown" error

[Jamie Strandboge]

I would like to briefly follow up to let people know that regressions are treated very seriously in Ubuntu. Regressions are closely examined to identify areas of improvement going forward, and as such, we have created a public incident report in:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IncidentReports/2011-05-31-pam-security-update-breaks-cron

Full details can be seen in that report, but here is a quick summary of what happened after the regression was found:
 * mirroring was stopped
 * the regressed packages were removed from the Ubuntu archive
 * the cause of the regression was identified and updates prepared
 * the fixed packages were built and verified to correct the issue and then were published to the archive
 * once it was established that mirroring could be safely re-enabled, it was
 * an email was sent to ubuntu-security-announce (https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-security-announce/2011-May/001341.html)
 * the Ubuntu website was updated (http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-1140-2/)

We are still conducting a post-mortem of the incident and identifying
areas of improvement so this does not happen again. One improvement that
has already been made is we have adjusted our pam test scripts to catch
this problem in the future.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/790538

Title:
  pam update causes cron to stop working with "Module is unknown" error

Status in “pam” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “pam” source package in Lucid:
  Fix Released
Status in “pam” source package in Maverick:
  Fix Released
Status in “pam” source package in Natty:
  Fix Released
Status in “pam” source package in Hardy:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  Upgrading libpam-modules from 1.1.1-4ubuntu1 to 1.1.1-4ubuntu2.2, cron stopped working, just gives a log message "Module is unknown". This happened during unattended-upgrades this night, so there might be a lot of people who didn't realize that yet.
  Downgrading to 1.1.1-4ubuntu1 fixes this.
  Ubuntu 10.10 amd64, almost vanilla, fresh, minimum install + java (ppa) + postgresql9 (ppa).