ok, my system - RH7.3 is doing something that's creating a real headache for me, and I'm hoping someone here can help.

We offer FTP accounts, which of course involves me adding a user to my system with /sbin/false as the shell account. Don't want anyone banging around. We require them to register through the site, then they PM me with the username and password they wanna use.

on 7.1, I set them up with the requested password and everything was fine. took about 10 seconds.

On 7.3, it seems to be requiring that the user log into a shell account and change their password before it will allow an ftp login.

See where my pain is? I'm having to create the account with a generic password, fire up putty.exe, log in as them, change the password, and THEN they can use ftp. Arg. In other words, my box seems to think every new user's password expires immediately, and I don't want it to ever expire.

Any help?

Do me a favor: post a line from /etc/passwd with one of these accounts. That should tell us what you set it as.

For instance:
guest:x:512:512::/home/guest:/bin/bash

I'm wondering if it's a "chage" or PAM thing...
Any clues from "passwd -S <account>" or "chage -l <account>"?
Log errors/messages?