I've honestly been looking at this for a couple of hours now (and have been reading about PAM for a couple of days) and have mainly established that I myself am not crazy. I have a new configuration for the file /etc/pam.d/passwd as follows:
auth required /lib/security/pam_pwdb.so account required /lib/security/pam_pwdb.so password required /lib/security/pam_cracklib.so retry=3 minlen=32 password required /lib/security/pam_pwdb.so md5 use_authtok but when I give the passwd command to change my password, I get the following error: passwd: Critical error - immediate abort I get no message in the /var/log directory for this. Also, when I use the distribution defaults the passwd command prompts just fine without the error. It also fails similarly when I use: password required pam_cracklib.so retry=3 password required pam_unix.so use_authtok nullok md5 but it succeeds when I leave off pam_cracklib.so and just use the default setting from the distribution: password required pam_unix.so nullok obscure min=4 max=8 md5 I've looked at the modules, and they are all in /lib/security. I even tried uninstalling and then reinstalling libpam-modules and it's the same. I also tried upgrading form kernel 2.2.17 to kernel 2.2.19, and it didn't change. Finally, I have another debian stable machine which has the same environment (as near as I can tell of course) that works with the pam_cracklib.so module and the pam_unix.so module together just fine. So, I'm perplexed. The really bothersome thing is that I can't find any diagnostic output. I search for "pam" in the /var/log directory, and the only pam related stuff is old from other problems this afternoon that I fixed because there were diagnostic messages explaining the problems. So, did I find a bug, or am I doing something stupid here? -- http://www.eskimo.com/~xeno [EMAIL PROTECTED] Physically I'm at: 5101 N. 45th St., Tacoma, WA, 98407-3717, U.S.A.