there is no NIS what so ever, and as far as i know yes, nscd is working fine. and Max Gribov is grabage that apparently got copy/pasted by me into the message by mistake, so sorry about that. the error message i get should read: datatwirl@mordor:~ > passwd passwd: User not known to the underlying authentication module datatwirl@mordor:~ > I am assuming this has to do with pam (what other module would passwd be talking about?), but pam seems to be configured properly as well. max On Wed, 16 Aug 2000, Roman Drahtmueller wrote:

Hi Max,

...

Hi, I am having a very strange problem on my suse 6.3... whenever i try to change passwd for any user, i get

[datatwirl@mordor datatwirl]$ passwd passwd: User not known to the underlying authentication module Max Gribov [datatwirl@mordor datatwirl]$

i can change passwd's as root for any user, but the user himself cannot change his own passwd. this applies for all users on my system, and since many of them have default passwd, it became a serious security concern as well.

how come this is happening? whats screwed up - pam? passwd? my machine? and what shoud i do about this, besides closing everyone's account?

thanks alot

max

Very often, it is comparatively easy to solve a problem. Instead, recognizing the problem is difficult.

The information that you provide is somewhat sparse.

Do you use NIS/NIS+? What are the permissions of /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, /etc/resolv.conf, /usr/bin/passwd? Is your nscd running? Did you check for irregularities/inconsistencies in /etc/passwd,shadow? Who is Max Gribov?

Thanks, Roman. -- - - | Roman Drahtm�ller // "Caution: Cape does | SuSE GmbH - Security Phone: // not enable user to fly." | N�rnberg, Germany +49-911-740530 // (Batman Costume warning label) | - -

Von: Alexander Reelsen Datum: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 20:52:37 +0200 An: suse-security@suse.com Betreff: Re: [suse-security] cant use passwd??

This is possible. How does your /etc/pam.d/passwd config file look like? This is mine, quite stripped down and not of a suse system:

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 md5 shadow

this is the one i have, i did´not change anything with pam auth required /lib/security/pam_unix.so nullok account required /lib/security/pam_unix.so password required /lib/security/pam_pwcheck.so nullok use_cracklib password required /lib/security/pam_unix.so nullok use_first_pass u$ session required /lib/security/pam_unix.so i did only recognize that changing to 6.4. made it complicate to change the passwd´s for our users that oftenly forget their passwd´s getting in with an ssh client on mac or windows ist no problem, but yast with ist F4, F5 etc. is sometimes difficult on non-standard keyboards. ciao wolfgang