crond: Authentication token is no longer valid; new one required

Problem

Your cron scritps stop running.

Analysis

Examine your log – most often /var/log/messages. If you find there something like this:

Sep 27 19:00:01 ns2 crond[8163]: Authentication token is no longer valid; new one required

then the password of a user which runs the cron scripts must be changed. In my case this was typical for Mandriva Linux distributions.

Solution

Change the password of a user which runs the cron scripts. This user is most often root. Use the ‘passwd’ command to change the password.