Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 57320
pam and NIS - HOME not found for rexec etc.
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:38:38 EDT
There seems to be a problem with pam (I'd suppose) that makes rexec, rsh and others not get the correct directory. This only happens with NIS, it works fine with local user accounts. This definitely worked in 7.0. I _think_ I used this without problems in 7.1 too, but honestly I don't really know. Some examples to demonstrate this: # local user - works fine $ rexec -l username -p xxx nishost pwd /home/username # NIS user - oops :( $ rexec -l username -p xxx nishost pwd No remote directory. rexec: Error in rexec system call, rexec: (The following system error may itself be in error) rexec: No such file or directory I'll attach two strace files. 2nd example: Using xon from the XFree86 package does get you into your HOME directory but to /. The same is true when using xrsh (you can eg. http://www.uni-kiel.de/campus/unix/RPMS/freeware/sparc/xrsh-5.8-2.sparc.SunOS-5.7.rpm - this works fine as the contained xrsh file is a shell script).
Created attachment 40251 [details] strace of rexec and local user
Created attachment 40252 [details] strace of rexec and NIS user
What output do you get when you run "getent passwd username" on nishost?
Seems to be ok. [user]:[encoded password]:[uid]:[gid]:[gecos]:[home]:[shell]
The problem still exists in 8.0.
Just found out that things work fine as soon as I set the home directory o=rx Not a solution, but it might help idfentifying the bug ...
Finally found the reason - should have thought of this earlier ... The HOME directories are mounted using NFS and root is mapped to anonymous. If I export with no_root_squash, things work fine. So this is not really a NIS but an NFS Problem. I think this is a bug anyway ... (Hm, why does root need to access the user's home directory?)
This surely isn't a bug in pam.