PAM authentication failure?

[Charlie Brady]

On Wed, 19 Aug 1998, Stephen L Arnold wrote:

> Can anybody explain why /var/log/messages is filled with the 
> following?
> 
> Aug 18 09:37:53 rama PAM_pwdb[28483]: 1 authentication failure; 
> (uid=0) -> arnold for samba service
> 
> Aug 18 09:38:25 rama PAM_pwdb[28494]: (login) session opened for 
> user arnold by arnold(uid=0)
> 
> The first one happens every time I browse to rama from win95 
> Explorer; the second one is from a telnet login (obviously, I'm 
> concerned about the former, but not the latter).

You are using Linux with the Pluggable Authentication Module system.
Probably RedHat linux.

You get the messages logged because the client you are using is folding
your password to upper case, so samba is trying once with the uppercased
version of your password (which gives the authenication failure message),
then again with the password it received lowercased, which matches.

I've submitted a patch to change the way that samba interacts with PAM
so that these irritating and irrelevant messages go away.

Charlie Brady - Telstra  |internet: cbrady at ind.tansu.com.au
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