question and a helpful hint (pam_tally)

["Ben Yau" <byau@cardcommerce.com>]

Just wanted to post something that happened to me today that may be of
future help to others.  One of the ops guys here installed Debian on one of
our nids servers a week ago (?) . For some reason when I logged in (ssh) it
automatically booted me outand I had no idea why.  I would ssh in as root
and try to su - byau and still automatically logged me out.

Turns out from a look at /var/log/message that somehting called pam_tally
was cuasing a problem.  Now I don't the op configured this in since he is a
bit green and usually does some default install.  Anyawy, it turns out the
default denials were set to 5 (/etc/pam.d/login) and after that it wouldn't
let me log in (even with the right password).

I ended up doing a
pam_tally -user byau -reset=0

And then could log in again.

So that's the helpful hint.

My question is. How come upon a successful login pam_tally does not reset
itself to zero?

Thanks!

Ben Yau