[Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#527307: passwd: Undescriptive error message when password changing fails due to quota limit

[Juha Kalevi Kallio]

Package: passwd
Version: 1:4.1.3.1-1
Severity: minor

If the user using passwd has a quota limit on the root filesystem, and  
that limit is reached by using passwd, the error message given is  
just: "passwd: Authentication token manipulation error", and the  
password is not changed. Nothing is written to /var/log/auth.log  
either in this case. The real problem can only be seen by runnin as  
root "strace -p" on the process. That reveals the following  
information: 'open("/etc/nshadow",  
O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC|O_LARGEFILE, 0666) = -1 EDQUOT (Disk quota  
exceeded)'.

After the user's quota of 4 bytes was removed, he could change his  
password normally. The situation would have been resolved much  
quicker, if passwd had relayed this error to the user by a distinct  
message, instead of the generic one.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
   APT prefers unstable
   APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.29.1
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=fi_FI at euro (charmap=ISO-8859-15)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages passwd depends on:
ii  debianutils                   3.1.2      Miscellaneous utilities  
specific t
ii  libc6                         2.9-10     GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libpam-modules                1.0.1-9    Pluggable Authentication  
Modules f
ii  libpam0g                      1.0.1-9    Pluggable Authentication  
Modules l
ii  libselinux1                   2.0.71-1   SELinux shared libraries

passwd recommends no packages.

passwd suggests no packages.

-- debconf information:
   passwd/password-mismatch:
   passwd/username:
   passwd/password-empty:
   passwd/make-user: true
   passwd/md5: false
   passwd/shadow: true
   passwd/username-bad:
   passwd/user-fullname: