Hi my fist post,tons of info on the forum but still didn't find
a solution to my prob.

I am trying to harden a production system running rhel 5.4
My problem is with pam_tally2.I want pam_tally2 to lockout almost all users
after 3 failled attempts,i can do that easilly with deny=3.My problem
is that for some users or for a specific group i want pam_tally2 not to lock
their accounts not matter how many attempts they trie,to prevent a denial
of service attack.Any idea on how to do this,

Much appreciated

p.s seems that the per_user option is not working as expected,meaning
that even if i setup a faillog -m 0 username pam_tally2 overwrites that
every time i login with m=3 for all users,perhaps i am missing something here.

Anyone thought of something?Perhaps this cannot be done.If someone can confirm that i would be happy.
Thanks

NB: pam_tally is a different module than pam_tally2. You can't invoke the latter and assume it will behave like the former.

Read the following documentation on your RHEL5 system:

• /usr/share/doc/pam-0.99.6.2/txts/README.pam_tally
• /usr/share/doc/pam-0.99.6.2/txts/README.pam_tally2

Perhaps a different approach is in order, do your users reside in openldap?
The ppolicy overlay is configurable to have different rules for different users or groups of users. Using ppolicy with access.conf and Denyhosts might solve most of your problem.

This is the basic soup I start with.

http://www.openldap.org/doc/admin24/overlays.html
http://linux.die.net/man/5/access.conf
http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/

I apologize that this does not answer your question directly. I have not seen the other thread and perhaps this has been said similarly.

anomie:have read the documentation still couldn't find an answer to my problem.Thanks for the reply

frndrfoe:i was hoping to avoid openldap mainly because i have no knowledge of it.Since it seems there is no other way i will wait a few more days and if no other user answers i will have a go at it.Thanks for the reply.

Maybe you missed this, then: per_user does not exist as a pam_tally2 option.