Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 64293
RFE: allow an override of the /etc/nologin testing.
Last modified: 2016-09-28 16:56:43 EDT
Currently sshd tests for /etc/nologin *both* through the pam and on its own. This is very annoying - one assumes that it's possible to override the tests by modifying the /etc/pam.d/sshd, but then it turns out that the pam_nologin in /etc/pam.d/sshd is redundant and that sshd does the testing itself and there is no way to override it. In short, this RFE is for: 1) Configuration option to override the /etc/nologin testing in sshd itself (see also bug #47298). 2) Change in the default config shipped by RedHat to have the override turned on. P.S. According to bug #54108, the pam_nologin needs to be moved from auth to account in order to work properly even with the RSA authentication.
I concur this should be fixed. This is not how Red Hat Linux 9 behaved and having upgraded to Fedora Core 2 from RHL9 I was bitten by this.
This also appears to be a problem in RHEL 3. In my opinion there shouldn't be a toggle switch in sshd; the check should be done only in PAM.
Without solving bug 54108 the nologin processing shouldn't be removed. Also note, that the contents of /etc/nologin should be dumped on client's terminal. This isn't/cannot be the case of using pam for nologin processing. Adding a new configuration option is also not good without having it in upstream portable OpenSSH first so please report it to http://bugzilla.mindrot.org/.
OK, done that for you even with a patch. http://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1045 If upstream accepts it we'll see.