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This has happened several times now, and I am getting frustrated.

I don't know how it happens, but sometimes a user account gets locked out. I change their passwd, either through passwd or chpasswd. I am confident the password is set correctly, and that I am entering the password correctly when I attempt to login as that user, but for whatever reason, I get "Permission denied, please try again." and /var/log/secure has a line "Failed password for user from 1.2.3.4 port 1234".

I can delete the user, and recreate them, but it fails in the same way, even though the UID is different. This leads me to believe the username is in some file that needs to be reset. I have zeroed out /var/log/btmp and /var/log/wtmp, based on some forums that suggest these files could become corrupted.

The only work around I have found, is to create a new account with a new name, so instead of cliffm, use cliffm2.

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  • DISA STIG requires use of pam_faillock. Did you check the output of "faillock" to see if the user is has more than 3 failed attempts?
    – roartechs
    Dec 12, 2018 at 15:28
  • Yes, this is what the problem was. I forgot I asked anything here. faillock --reset --user cliffm fixed it
    – Cliff
    Dec 13, 2018 at 16:02

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
3

The answer to my problem was faillock.

faillock --user cliffm --reset
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