Cronjobs not running. Cron daemon not working

Question

First of all, the server specs:

VPS - OpenVZ, Ubuntu 14, Kernel 3.10

Now, it appears that the cron daemon is not running ANY crojobs at all and i cannot find out why.

I tried:

• Rebooting the server.
• Restarting the cron daemon
• Changing permissions in /etc/crontab, /etc/cron.d, /etc/cron.daily and /var/spool/cron
• Disabling one by one, the cron jobs from crontab, cron.d and spool ones.
• Changing permission in /usr/sbin
• Upgrading vixie cron
• Removing the pam_loginuid.so in pam.d
• Changing passwords around (to the ones I think were the first ones)
• Tried making a cron job that outputs a logfile every minute in /etc/crontab file, user crontab and root crontab

and I still cannot find a solution.

NOTE: Whenever i changed permissions to files, I used another fresh Debian install for reference.

Also, there is this message that is being written to cron.log every minute and also, cannot find the source of it. Attaching image:

This is my last resort before doing a full system reinstall.

Answer 1

I cannot comment as yet so I have to post this as an answer.

You didn't mentioned whether you checked your /var/log/auth.log file.

This error is usually caused by a pam module so this log should give you some hints.