3.8p1 password expiry, Solaris 8

[Darren Tucker]

Dmitry Berezin wrote:

> I was able to replicate this problem, but only in the same window, that I
> have had opened since yesterday. After logging out of Gnome desktop and
> logging back in, I can no longer produce the same results. Most likely it
> was some combination of "su"s in the same session, but again, I am unable to
> replicate it anymore.
> "passwd", when called without any arguments, will try to change password of
> the originally logged in user, so in my case when sshd called passwd, it was
> somehow referring back to the account that logged into the desktop.

Maybe something was fooling passwd about who the logged-on user was? 
(wtmp entries or something?)

> Although, something like that would probably be a very rare case (and
> probably while testing), would it be safer to call passwd <user name>
> instead? 

The problem with doing that is some platforms won't allow non-root users 
to use "passwd username" even if the the username supplied is the same 
as the logged-in user.

$ whoami
dtucker
$ uname
Linux
$ passwd dtucker
passwd: Only root can specify a user name.

-- 
Darren Tucker (dtucker at zip.com.au)
GPG key 8FF4FA69 / D9A3 86E9 7EEE AF4B B2D4  37C9 C982 80C7 8FF4 FA69
     Good judgement comes with experience. Unfortunately, the experience
usually comes from bad judgement.