Hi all, first time poster here.

I've spent hours trying to search for someone with a similar issue, but have not had any success so far.

I work on a suite with a number of servers and consoles running Red Hat Enterprise Ed 5, and I'm seeing this issue on all of them.

Whenever a user attempts to log in to the system, weather via SSH or directly from the console, if the user types the wrong password the first time, any subsequent attempts to log in fail.

With SSH, the user has to kill the connection and re-login.

From the console, after the first failed attempt, the user is prompted for the user name, but after this is entered, the user is never re-prompted for a password, the "Incorrect Password" message is just displayed immediately after the user types in their user name.

There's nothing obvious in the log files. These systems are also classified, so I'm limited by the information I can provide. If someone could point me to the right config file to check or perhaps a missing rpm that would be helpful.

Any help is apreciated.

Thank you,

Fail regardless of time or does it succeed if the user waits for say 5 minutes?


Which logfiles and what exactly does "nothing obvious" mean?


I'd start with a local login and the /etc/pam.d PAM stacks. Set debug flag where you think you need it and see if a login spews out more info. If that doesn't show anything then you could tell in generic terms (as long as you do not provide unique company, realm or machine identifiers that should not be a problem) how authentication configuration differs from defaults?