I am running RH 7.3 & when logging into it via ssh i get up to 8 attempts before it disconnects me. I would like to know how to lower this to say 3. I have attempted to do this with /etc/login.defs but it is still giving me 8 chances.

Does anyone what i am missing

Many Thanks

Andrew

Are you sure its giving you 8 chances and not 120 seconds.

I don't know of an ssh option to limit login tries (a bit odd - there should be one) but there is an option to limit the connection time. The LoginGraceTime value in sshd_config defaults to 120 seconds and gives the time after which a user is kicked off without a successful login.

Try reducing this time. After changing sshd_config, look for the sshd process with a Parent PID of 1 and kill it with a kill -1. This will refresh sshd without killing off existing processes.

Iain.

Is that controlled by /etc/login.defs? In the case of vsftp, the maximum number of connecting is set in /etc/xinetd.d/vsftpd by a variable called "instances". I found this variable in another file :/etc/xinetd.conf, but I think the default value can't be as small as 8. In suse, the default value is 20.

MMm I thought it was more a PAM module /lib/security/pam_tally.so

where you can setup something like deny=3 (maximum login retries).

I have set this but it does not make a difference

Depends on your distro, I guess.