Dear Maintainer,

Thanks for your work on request-tracker5.

I am running this in a system with apache2, mysql backend and exim4.

After a dist-upgrade to the current stable, everything seems to be working correctly except for the cron jobs in /etc/cron.d, which are causing an error every hour.

[206355] [Sat Dec 20 18:00:03 2025] [error]: No user with a GECOS (unix login) of 'www-data' was found. (/usr/share/request-tracker5/lib/RT/Interface/CLI.pm:123)

There is commentary online about this situation [1], specifically about the cron jobs in Debian. It suggests creating another superuser account with www-data. I have done that, and it seems not to have fixed anything.

But, looking at the source code in question:

sub GetCurrentUser  {

    require RT::CurrentUser;

    #Instantiate a user object

    my $Gecos= (getpwuid($<))[0];

    #If the current user is 0, then RT will assume that the User object
    #is that of the currentuser.

    $CurrentUser = RT::CurrentUser->new();
    $CurrentUser->LoadByGecos($Gecos);

    unless ($CurrentUser->Id) {
        $RT::Logger->error("No user with a GECOS (unix login) of '$Gecos' was found.");
    }

    return($CurrentUser);
}

It looks as though it's the gecos data...

I'm not sure how best to safely fix this?

I can't find a suggestion in README.Debian.

Kind regards,

CT.

[1] https://forum.bestpractical.com/t/no-user-with-a-gecos-found-when-running-rt-clean-shorteners-5-cron-job/41052

Hi All,

My apologies. I’d somehow missed out a specific “Unix login” field.

To summarise,

From the Admin -> Create view, I created another user called www-data (and was eventually careful to ensure the Unix login field was also www-data);
From the

From the Admin -> Global -> User Rights menu, I selected “rights for Administrators” and selected “do everything and anything”.

And the cron error is no longer there.

Sorry for the oversight folks.

Kind regards,

CT.



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