Re: Passwordless login

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Sun, Apr 18, 2004 at 02:06:50PM +0200, Søren Hansen wrote:
> My girlfriend has asked me to ask you if there's any chance that she
> wouldn't have to enter her password to login. Simply setting her
> password to an empty string is no good, since she'll still have to press
> return and besides, the server is available from the internet, so that's
> a no go. As a temporary fix to make her happy, I patched gdm_verify_user
> in verify-pam to use /etc/pam.d/gdm-autologin if local == TRUE. This,
> however brings on a whole new set of problems. (e.g. logging in as root
> without a password is not good). 
> Also, not all users might want this. I'm quite comfortable having to
> enter my password when I login on the same machine, so this has to be
> user configurable.
> Any brilliant ideas? I'm thinking that the existence of a semaphore file
> in $HOME/.gnome2/ will make gdm use gdm-autologin, but we don't know the
> username and hence the $HOME until after we've created the pam_handle,
> do we?

The thing is that PAM now asks for the username and we don't really know it
until PAM does it's thing.  Any solution would really have to be in PAM
itself (And that's where such policy should go anyway).  It would be useful
to create a pam module that would allow passwordless login for select local
users.  It also shouldn't be too hard I don't think.

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   Examine what is said, not who speaks.
                       -- Arabian Proverb