Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 193471
PAM don't log error on a "System error"
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:34 EST
Description of problem: I'm trying to package fcron https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=185531 "fcrontab -e" let a user to edit his fcrontab. Unfortunately, as root, the command fails and outputs "Could not authenticate user using PAM (4): System error". Sebastien Tricaud, one of the pam's maintener, tell me the code about pam in fcron is good. We trying to investigate, unfortunately, pam error are not log, neither in /var/log/messages or /var/log/secure Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 0.79-9.6 How reproducible: Steps to Reproduce: 1. get http://linuxelectronique.free.fr/download/fedora/4/SRPMS/fcron-3.0.1-7.src.rpm 2. recompile, install 3. as root, type "fcrontab -e" Actual results: "Could not authenticate user using PAM (4): System error" without any log Expected results: log that explain failure Additional info:
This is not a bug in PAM. The PAM library should not be called with fcron effective uid. The library returns system error because auditing code fails with uid == 0 and euid != 0. Maybe that could be fixed or worked around in the PAM library but I don't think it's worth it.