[I first sent this out on the 17th, but it seems to have been lost
to a power glitch at Mandrake - retrying.]
I've just changed some of the security levels on one of my machines
running Mandrake 8.0 - from no security whatsoever while running inside
our corporate VPN, to 'msec 4' now that I'm running behind a Linksys NAT
router to a DSL line. I now find it impossible to change user account
passwords. I did try backing off to 'msec 3', but that didn't help.
passwd claims 'all authentication tokens updated successfully' when
run as root to change a user account's password (e.g. 'passwd
<userlogin>') - but no change occurs in the password file. In addition,
/var/log/auth.log shows a message like
<machine> PAM_pwdb[#]: password for (login/UID) changed by (root/0)
So passwd appears to think it did something correctly - but as best
I can tell, it actually does nothing at all.
There are no problems changing *root*'s password, just user
passwords. In addition, attempts to change user passwords when su'ed to
that user simply fail:
% passwd
Changing password for <login>
(current) UNIX password:<entered>
passwd: Authentication service cannot retrieve authentication info.
Is this perhaps something to do with PAM? /etc/pam.d/passwd looks like
#%PAM-1.0
auth required /lib/security/pam_pwdb.so shadow nullok
account required /lib/security/pam_pwdb.so
password required /lib/security/pam_cracklib.so retry=3
password required /lib/security/pam_pwdb.so use_authtok nullok
shadow md5
But pam.d/passwd wasn't changed when I ran 'msec', anyway, so I'm
grabbing wildly for ideas. I tried rebuilding and debugging passwd, but
the problem seems to lie somewhere down inside the PAM libraries, which
are harder to rebuild and understand. I also tried removing the 'shadow'
keyword from the pam.d/passwd conf. file, since I'm not using shadow
passwords at present, but no change in behavior resulted.
Has anyone seen this behavior or know what's up? I searched in the
expert mail archives and on Google, but couldn't turn up a similar
problem report.
Thanks,
Jon
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