Hello!

I started to configure ppolicy in SLES11 SP3, and I think I succeeded with the 
LDAP part. However I did not understand how to integrate ppolicy to the OS, 
specifically:

I created one test user with a ppolicy, and expectation is that on first login 
the passowrd should be canged (minus grace logins). According to the syslog 
ppolicy triggers an expired password:

slapd[3990]: ppolicy_bind: Setting warning for password expiry for 
uid=windl2,ou=domain,dc=org = 0 seconds

However the user when logging in gets no type of message at all. It also seems 
that nothing is changed in the LDAP database when this message occurs. So what 
is actually "set" there?

When the user actually changes the password, I see the following attributes 
changed in LDAP:
userPassword, pwdHistory, shadowLastChange

What's not quite clear is when using SSHA-hashed passwords, what changes can be 
done regarding pwdCheckQuality. I can imagine that some checks will work if the 
client uses the extended operation to change the password, but not if the 
password is changed by an ordinary LDAP modify request. Is that correct?

Finally, maybe a stupid question: How does authentication against LDAP work? In 
the classical UNIX mechanism, the authenticating process would query the user 
name, then fetch the hashed password for that user, get the password from the 
user, hash it using the same salt, and then compare the results for a match. To 
my understanding you cannot get the hashed password from LDAP until 
authenticated, so that looks like a egg-hen paradoxon to me.

If anybody could enlighten me, I'd be glad.

Regards,
Ulrich



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