xscreensaver problem with RH 7.2

Robert Greimel greimel at ing.iac.es
Sat Dec 8 04:46:34 EST 2001


Hi,

we have recently upgraded systems that were working with NIS+ and Redhat 7.1
to Redhat 7.2. We found one persistent problem and I wonder if anybody else
has seen this as well or could give me a hint of how to solve it:

When a user logs on to the system everything works fine. Username and password
are being picked up through NIS+. The problem comes when the user decides to
lock the screen in X using xscreensaver. When the user types the password to
unlock the screen xscreensaver always gives "access denied" and logs (with audit
option in pam configuration) the following message:

Dec  7 16:25:30 xxxxx xscreensaver(pam_unix)[2444]: authentication failure; logname= uid=nnnn euid=nnnn tty=:0.0 ruser= rhost=  user=xxxxxx

This used to work under Redhat 7.1 . The pam.d configuration files for login
and xscreensaver both call the system-auth stack to verify the password:

auth       required     /lib/security/pam_stack.so service=system-auth

I have tried to downgrade xscreensaver and pam to the versions used in 7.1
without it leading to any success under 7.2

As a "workaround" I can of course disable password checking for xscreensaver
through pam, but that obviously defies the purpose of locking the screen.

Unfortunately I have run out of ideas of what could be wrong and would
appreciate any help with this problem.

As an aside, I found that I needed to upgrade nfs-utils to version 0.3.3-1
(from Rawhide). Otherwise rpc.mountd would periodically need to be restarted
in order to allow proper serving of NFS file systems to NIS+ netgroups.

Other facts about our setup that might be worth noting:
- we are using nis-utils-1.4.1
- we found that we did not need to use pam_unix2.so but that the stock
  pam_unix.so in Redhat 7.1 and 7.2 (well, possibly apart from xscreensaver)
  work fine.
- automount, login and NFS serving (after the above mentioned upgrade of
  nfs-utils) work fine with NIS+ under 7.2

Thanks

Robert

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Robert Greimel                    |
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