Description of problem: According to past experience and the current pam documetation, the presense of a /etc/nologin file should prevent nonroot logins but still permit root access. However, this does not appear to be the case. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): pam-0.77-65.1 How reproducible: Always. To reproduce: 1) Create /etc/nologin 2) Attempt to login as root via a virtual console. Access will be denied. For any user a line like the following will be appended to /var/log/secure: Apr 5 21:04:54 marco login[3570]: Please ignore underlying account module Note that ssh logins as root will still succeed. This is because sshd handles interpretation of /etc/nologin internally and ignores the pam_nologin reference in /etc/pam.d/sshd (so I think that line might be superfluous). I will attach an strace and an ltrace of a mingetty instance failing to allow root access while /etc/nologin exists. The problem appears to be in pam_setcred(), near the end of the ltrace. However, I can't troubleshoot it much beyond that.
Created attachment 112766 [details] Strace of mingetty denying root access while /etc/nologin exists
Created attachment 112767 [details] ltrace of mingetty denying root access when /etc/nologin exists
Sorry about the formatting. So much for my experiment with using links. =:\
duplicate of bug 143750 Patch is already included in the scheduled pam update for U1.
*** Bug 155357 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***