Weird PAM behavior (Was: KDE and desktop locking)

[Michal Kochanowicz]

On Fri, Nov 12, 2004 at 09:15:36AM +0100, Marcin Król wrote:
> on AC, after entering bad password there is a dialog too, but saying: 
> "Caonnot unlock session because authentication system failed to work. 
> You must kill kdesktop_lock (pid 12345) manually". This information is 
> misleading, as the authentication system _did not_ failed to work. It 
> _worked ok_ and checked that password was invalid. Note about manually 

Well, not. It failed. pam_authenticate() returns code "1", and
pam_strerror() translates it to "dlopen() failure". Making kcheckpass
SUID root solves the problem, but this isn't The Right Way (tm), I
think, because PAM uses SUID root helper, /sbin/unix_chkpwd and other
SUIDs shouldn't be necessary.

I think we need someone with better PAM understanding to explain why it
doesn't work without SUID.

PS.

#v+
[misiek at wieszak misiek]$ cat /etc/pam.d/kdesktop
#%PAM-1.0
auth            required        pam_unix.so shadow nullok
[misiek at wieszak misiek]$
#v-

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