Re: [gdm-list] gdm not giving change password option after password expiration

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Dennis:

> In my system, for users whose password has expired, gdm is not giving
> any way to change password, though it shows the message of expired
> password. Could you please tell what is gone wrong ?

Did this use to work with an earlier version of GDM, or has this
always been broken?

I'd guess that this is probably a PAM issue.  GDM just is a blind GUI
interface that asks the user whatever PAM tells it to.  If your PAM
module supports entering a new password, then GDM should "just work".
Refer to /etc/pam.d or /etc/pam.conf (and related manpages) for some
information about PAM.

The problem may be that your PAM module requires some configuration
to enable this feature.  It may be off by default.  Or perhaps the
PAM module you are using doesn't have this feature at all, and you
should switch to using a PAM module that does.

PAM modules are very distro specific, so you probably should take this
issue up with your distro and find out what they recommend to get
this feature working.

There is also the obvious possibility that GDM may have a bug that
is causing it not to work properly with PAM.  If you are sure that
PAM is working, and GDM is not; then we need to further explore what
might be causing GDM to not work properly.

If you switch to a different display manager (e.g. KDM, xdm, etc.)
does it work?  If it works with other display managers and not GDM,
then this is likely a GDM bug.

Brian