Hello everyone,
I ran into an interesting problem last week, it started happening
out of the blue. At the login prompt, after anyone enters their
login names, the following message is printed out before the passwd
prompt:
configuration error - unknown item 'PASS_INACTIVE' (notify administrator)
configuration error - unknown item 'PASS_EXPIRE' (notify administrator)
configuration error - unknown item 'GROUP' (notify administrator)
configuration error - unknown item 'HOME' (notify administrator)
configuration error - unknown item 'SHELL' (notify administrator)
configuration error - unknown item 'SKEL' (notify administrator)
I looked in the system log (/var/log/messages) and here's what comes out:
Jan 25 11:16:34 gris311pc1 syslog: PAM authentication failed for in.rlogind
Jan 25 11:16:34 gris311pc1 syslog: unknown configuration item `PASS_INACTIVE'
Jan 25 11:16:34 gris311pc1 syslog: unknown configuration item `PASS_EXPIRE'
Jan 25 11:16:34 gris311pc1 syslog: unknown configuration item `GROUP'
Jan 25 11:16:34 gris311pc1 syslog: unknown configuration item `HOME'
Jan 25 11:16:34 gris311pc1 syslog: unknown configuration item `SHELL'
Jan 25 11:16:34 gris311pc1 syslog: unknown configuration item `SKEL'
Now, this just started happening Friday morning (1/22/99). The only two
events that have taken place before then are (a) I reset the BIOS clock
because it was off by about 10 minutes, and (b) there was an entry
in /var/log/messages that some unknown user had logged on the night
before (1/21/99):
Jan 21 22:58:18 gris311pc1 telnetd[2043]: ttloop: peer died: Success
Jan 21 22:59:46 gris311pc1 syslog: FAILED LOGIN 2 FROM ww2.vnti.com FOR w, User not
known to the underlying authentication module
Jan 21 22:59:50 gris311pc1 syslog: LOGIN ON ttyp7 BY blow FROM ww2.vnti.com
Jan 21 23:04:53 gris311pc1 syslog: unknown configuration item `PASS_INACTIVE'
Jan 21 23:04:53 gris311pc1 syslog: unknown configuration item `PASS_EXPIRE'
Jan 21 23:04:53 gris311pc1 syslog: unknown configuration item `GROUP'
Jan 21 23:04:53 gris311pc1 syslog: unknown configuration item `HOME'
Jan 21 23:04:53 gris311pc1 syslog: unknown configuration item `SHELL'
Jan 21 23:04:53 gris311pc1 syslog: unknown configuration item `SKEL'
I checked the passwd file and, unless this user is something created by linux
at installation, I surely never created an account on my machine for this
user.
Does anyone have any ideas as to why this just started happening, and more
importatnly, how to fix it?
Belinda
