[Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#600755: Bug#600755: Autologin fails with login from shadow > 4.1.3.1

[Nicolas François]

Hello,

On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 02:45:44PM -0400, frank.peters at comcast.net wrote:
> 
> My system is Gentoo, but Gentoo uses the shadow package that is
> maintained by Debian and it is appropriate to make a report here.
> 
> I have been using the following autologin procedure on my machine
> to avoid passwords for some time without problems:
> 
> http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/TIP_Passwordless_Login
> 
> However, using any version of shadow greater than 4.1.3.1 causes
> this autologin procedure to fail.  The system will only hang
> at boot and there are no errors logged.
> 
> The trouble begins with login from shadow-4.1.4.  Any login taken from
> shadow-4.1.3.1 or earlier allows the autologin procedure to succeed.
> 
> There have been some changes to the login program that may cause
> this problem and it may be related to PAM.  I do not use PAM on my
> system.
> 
> A bug report was filed on the Gentoo bug tracker (https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324419) but this is definitely an upstream issue and needs to be reported
> to the Debian list.

I did not reproduce this.
Could you check if there are some information logged in /var/log/syslog or
/var/log/auth.log.

It might be that login is more strict regarding having an entry in UTMP
before it is started, which might not be the case with the autologin
method you are using.

There might also be output indicating why login failed. You may have to
block your script at the end (e.g. with 'read') or you can redirect
login's stdout and stderr.

-- 
Nekral