There is no "correct" id for system users and groups, beyond the first 100 provided by base-passwd. The numbers the rest get will depend on the order packages were originally installed, so they are not guaranteed even within the same release.
Reinstalling cron-daemon-common and cron should chown /var/spool/cron/crontabs/ and /usr/bin/crontab according to your current databases. When you tried this yourself, did you accidentally lose the set-group-id bit on the binary?
You should probably also reinstall other packages that relate to users and groups in the range 101…999.
The trailing slash in the crontab error message appears to be a cosmetic mistake.
Reinstalling cron-daemon-common and cron should chown /var/spool/cron/crontabs/ and /usr/bin/crontab according to your current databases. When you tried this yourself, did you accidentally lose the set-group-id bit on the binary?
You should probably also reinstall other packages that relate to users and groups in the range 101…999.
The trailing slash in the crontab error message appears to be a cosmetic mistake.
Statistics: Posted by jojopi — Sat Jan 03, 2026 7:44 pm