Bug 3029

Summary:	pam fails on empty passwords.
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Han-Wen Nienhuys <hanwen>
Component:	pam	Assignee:	Cristian Gafton <gafton>
Status:	CLOSED RAWHIDE	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	6.0	CC:	bart.durinck, bgilbert, cg2v, goeran, pahe+redhat-bugzilla, tompermutt
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2000-02-05 20:16:45 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 Han-Wen Nienhuys 1999-05-25 09:32:19 UTC

PAM 0.66-18 does not allow empty password fields in
/etc/passwd (as installed out of the box) Logging
in does not work, and setting the password  also fails.

Comment 1 Dale Lovelace 1999-05-27 21:35:59 UTC

*** Bug 3024 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

It is not possible to log in with a blank password.

This is problem if you forget the root password, boot
into single user mode and reset the password.

I do not use shadow passwords.

It seems as if the nullok option from pam_pwdb is ignored.

Comment 2 Benjamin Gilbert 1999-07-18 17:02:59 UTC

Is there a workaround so that users with null passwords can at least log in?  Is this going to get fixed?

Comment 3 Göran Uddeborg 1999-07-27 11:17:59 UTC

A workaround is to use shadow passwords.

Comment 4 Michael K. Johnson 1999-08-02 16:16:59 UTC

*** Bug 4060 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

With shadowing turned off, setting a zero-length password
seems to corrupt the password data-base.  Whether I do it by
editing /etc/passwd, or using passwd as root, the user is
unable to log on.  Furthermore, even if root runs passwd
again to set a non-null password, that user remains hosed.

------- Additional Comments From johnsonm  07/30/99 17:10 -------
I cannot reproduce this.  Are you using NIS or some other form of
authentication besides /etc/passwd?  A non-root user cannot set a
null password with the passwd command; perhaps the old password is
still in force for you?

------- Additional Comments From johnsonm  08/02/99 12:14 -------
OK, 3029 does look like the same report...

Comment 5 bart.durinck 1999-08-04 23:15:59 UTC

Same prob here.
The work-around of using shadow passwd is NOK if you have NIS and Sun
clients :-(
But now for the good news :-) I think I found a fix. It's in pwdb (not
pam) I'll submit it in a moment.
Thanks to <balajir.nec.com>, his "Re: cannot log in: 6.0
upgrade broke PAM / pwdb" in linux.redhat.install got me on the right
track.

Comment 6 Bill Nottingham 1999-10-19 16:13:59 UTC

*** Bug 6085 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

If shadow passwords are not being used on a system, the
following things do not seem to work properly

1) logging in if you have an empty password. pam_pwdb
reports 'get passwd; pwdb: request not recognized' in syslog
2) changing  or deleting the password of an entity that
currently does not have a password (either an 'empty
password' or 'no password'). passwd reports success, but the
contents of /etc/passwd are not changed

Comment 7 Bill Nottingham 2000-02-05 20:16:59 UTC

This should be fixed in the latest pam and pwdb packages in Raw Hide.