Nonexistent user, continued

[Mark Brodis]

I am a complete noobie with any of this, but I had an instance where I
got the "login attempt for nonexistent user", and the problem (not
found by me, refer to me being the noob) was /dev/pts/ was not mounted
in /etc/fstab.  I realize this is probably totally out in left-field
from what you guys are dealing with but we got that exact same error,
user was valid, but the device for the login had not been
created/mounted and that same error came up.  This was a few months ago
and thus on a older version of dropbear.

Just my $0.00 worth...

Good Luck,
Mark Brodis

--- Matt Johnston <matt at ucc.asn.au> wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 24, 2005 at 07:08:55AM -0700, Yan Seiner wrote:
> > When I try to log in via dropbear, I get login attempt for
> non-existent 
> > user from 111.222.333.444:nnnn
> > 
> > This is the result of running ssh -vvv on the client.  There
> doesn't 
> > appear to be anything useful on the dropbear end other than that
> message.
> > 
> > I am not using shadow files, and I've checked that shells and home
> dirs 
> > exist as shown in the /etc/passwd file....
> 
> The "login attempt for nonexistent user" warning gets
> printed if the call to the standard library getpwnam()
> function fails. The username isn't printed in the logs
> because quite often it might actually be someone mistakenly
> typing a password rather than a username, which shouldn't be
> logged.
> 
> The standard library doesn't provide any reasons for
> getpwnam failure - running "strace -f" on the Dropbear
> process (if available) is often insightful for problems like
> this though. If you are compiling Dropbear yourself, you
> could try compiling with DEBUG_TRACE enabled in debug.h and
> running with -v -F -E, though it seems unlikely that a
> username other than "root" is actually getting passed to the
> server.
> 
> Perhaps double check that /etc/passwd and maybe /etc/group
> are well formed. What sort of platform are you running on
> (OS and libc)?
> 
> Let me know how you go.
> 
> Cheers,
> Matt
> 
> 



	
		
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