From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020724 Description of problem: user enters up2date at prompt and up2date proceeds without requesting root password Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.up2date --configure (password requested) 2.up2date (no request for password) 3.up2date --configure (password requested) 4.up2date (no password request) 5.up2date (no password request) 6.up2date (no password request) Actual Results: up2date proceded normally to message that system fully updated and no new packages needed. Expected Results: Expected pop up box requesting that the root password be entered Additional info: Before sending this report, tried up2date once more and this time it did request the root password. Did nothing except spend time filling out this report.
It seems most RH config tools now use pam_timestamp.so (written IIRC by nalin), which is supposed to "remember" that you were asked for the root password recently, so this may be intentional. I don't know how long the timeout is, however.
Sounds like pam_timestamp to me as well.