[CentOS] CentOS 5 - locking out users afer 3 failed attempts

Tue Apr 20 19:30:08 UTC 2010
Ray Van Dolson <rayvd at bludgeon.org>

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 08:26:18PM +0100, Tom Brown wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I am trying to lock users after 3 attempts and then set the timeout
> before they can log in again.
> I thought i could achieve this with
> 
> auth required pam_tally.so deny=3 unlock_time=600
> 
> in /etc/pam.d/system-auth but it seems to not be the case - I cant
> find a working config for this anywhere and i wonder if anyone has one
> they can share?
> 
> thanks

I'm not familiar with this module, but it looks like there's a
userspace tool 'pam_tally' which you could use to query the tally
files.

Might be worth confirming that the login failures and such are even
being tracked correctly.

Any errors in your logs?  A brief perusal of the man page seems to
indicate that your syntax is correct...

Ray