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

[Nicolas François]

reassign 527307 pam
thanks

On Wed, May 06, 2009 at 08:16:06PM +0300, juhakall at mail.student.oulu.fi wrote:
>
> 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)'.

The file is used by PAM to update /etc/shadow.

> 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.

This looks similar to 520184.
I don't think new error codes can be added to PAM.

Maybe strerror (errno) could be logged to syslog?

Best Regards,
-- 
Nekral