Description of problem: I teach Linux classes where students perform advanced PAM lab exercises. One very common issue we run into is mingetty clearing the screen to fast to read any error messages such as "Account is expired". You can tell that some sort of error message is displayed on the screen, but there is no time to read it. My suggestion to remedy this problem is to use the --delay option on the mingetty lines, for example: # Run gettys in standard runlevels 1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --delay=5 tty1 2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --delay=5 tty2 3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --delay=5 tty3 4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --delay=5 tty4 5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --delay=5 tty5 6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --delay=5 tty6 Or maybe just on the first tty. For what it's worth, SUSE avoids this problem by using --noclear on tty1. That would also be an acceptable solution. It would be great if a solution could be selected and make it in before the March 11th freeze.
I'm not sure exposing these errors to the user is worthwhile - after all, only the admin can fix them at this point, and these errors are in the logs.
I'm requesting this for the benefit of the admins not the users. The types of error messages are varied, not just "account expired". Any PAM typos will cause various pam modules to print errors on the screen. These are typos caused by the admin. For the admins (or the users), being able to see/report the actual error message is much more helpful then just "something flashes on the screen real quick" The current behavior isn't very friendly. If mingetty is not adjusted, then PAM and login should be patched to not print error messages to STDERR. Right now it teases you with information that you can't quite read. Even a 2-3 second delay to read the error messages would be enough.
Changing version to '9' as part of upcoming Fedora 9 GA. More information and reason for this action is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
Just to keep alive Some feedback about this bug. Thanks. -- Fedora Bugzappers volunteer triage team https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers
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Fedora 9 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2009-07-10. Fedora 9 is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.