Permissions on the password database may be too restrictive

[Thorsten Kukuk]

On Mon, May 01, Bent Bagger wrote:

> Hi
> 
> I teach a Linux course at the Engineering College in Copenhagen and
> the subject next time is PAM. To demonstrate how to use PAM I have
> taken a small program from the O'Reilly book "Linux Security Cookbook"
> (p.74). Trying to execute the compiled program results in  this error
> message:
> 
> Permissions on the password database may be too restrictive

Which means your applications runs as normal user, and a normal user
is not allowed to access /etc/shadow.
 
> The funny (?) thing is that if I make /etc/shadow world readable with
> chmod, the program runs succesfully. This, however, is not a
> workaround, I like! I hope one of you can provide me with a better
> solution.

Give your application the necessary rights to read (and, if it 
should change the password) and write to that file.

  Thorsten

-- 
Thorsten Kukuk         http://www.suse.de/~kukuk/      kukuk at suse.de
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