[brlug-general] "unable to lock password file"

[John Hebert]

Thanks for the reply Matt. I've poked around with 'lsattr' and it looks like he just did 'chattr -R +i /etc/*'.

However, when I do 'lsattr /' in the root dir, I see a couple of dirs with an "I" attribute (/etc and /sbin). What does the "I" attribute mean exactly? I read the man page, and it was less than helpful. Or I'm dense. ;)

From 'man chattr':



The 'I' attribute is used by the htree code to indicate that a directory
is behind indexed using hashed trees.  It may not be set or reset using 
chattr(1),

although it can be displayed by
lsattr(1).

???

So does this mean the "I" attribute was there by default? Does the "I" attribute affect a file or folders permissions?

Thanks.

John Hebert

----- Original Message ----
From: Matthew Eastman <matt at meastman.org>
To: general at brlug.net
Sent: Saturday, October 21, 2006 10:35:13 PM
Subject: Re: [brlug-general] "unable to lock password file"

You can take a look at which special attributes are set for files
using lsattr. Hopefully that will help you find out which files he had
fun with.

Matt

On 10/21/06, John Hebert <johnahebert at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Howdy,
>
> A "security analyst" made some unknown changes with 'chattr' to a server I'm administrating (yeah, I know. I'm waiting on a detailed list of changes he made.) and now I can't add or del users from /etc/passwd. When I try, I get "unable to lock password file". Also, when I try to change a user's password, I get the error "passwd: Authentication token lock busy".
>
> I've removed the immutable bit from /etc/passwd* and /etc/shadow* with 'chattr -i ...' and it still didn't work. I even recursively removed the immutable bit for /etc/* and _still_ can't add or delete users.
>
> Anybody ever see anything like this? Where does the password lock file get created? I think PAM is failing, but I'm not sure why.
>
> Thanks,
> John Hebert
>
>
>
>
>
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