Bug 230650

Summary:	/sbin/nologin should not be in /etc/shells
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4	Reporter:	Jan "Yenya" Kasprzak <kas>
Component:	setup	Assignee:	Phil Knirsch <pknirsch>
Status:	CLOSED DUPLICATE	QA Contact:	David Lawrence <dkl>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	4.3	CC:	rvokal
Target Milestone:	---
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Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2007-05-24 13:23:41 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Jan "Yenya" Kasprzak 2007-03-01 22:13:49 UTC

Description of problem:
The /etc/shells file is often used by various programs to distinguish between
normal users and pseudoaccounts (see the shells(5) manpage for example). Yet the
default /etc/shells (at least in RHEL4 update 3 and Fedora Core 6) contains
/sbin/nologin, a shell dedicated for pseudoaccounts only. I think /etc/shells
should not contain /sbin/nologin as a valid shell, as this goes directly against
the purpose of both /etc/shells and /sbin/nologin. Or (as the worst possible
solution) the manpage of shells(5) should be corrected.

I am keeping the severity at "medium", but I think it might be a security bug,
as some daemons can mishandle pseudoaccount as a normal user account by looking
whether the account has shell which is listed in /etc/shells.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
setup-2.5.37-1.3 (and also setup-2.6.1.1-1.fc6).

Comment 1 Phil Knirsch 2007-03-09 16:07:55 UTC

Reviewing.

Read ya, Phil

Comment 2 Phil Knirsch 2007-05-24 13:23:41 UTC

/sbin/nologin is intentional and was introduced quite some time ago as a RFE
specifically for that purpose to have a valid shell that prevents user login.

See also https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla//show_bug.cgi?id=53963

Thanks,

Read ya, Phil

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 70414 ***