Changing password to something similar hangs

[BMR777]

This occurred on Ubuntu 10.04 Beta 1:

When attempting to change my account's password multiple times in a single session the change password window hung. I was able to successfully change my password once or twice in a session without incident, however after this on subsequent attempts attempting to change the account's password again would cause the change password box to freeze when the new password was submitted.

The change password box became unresponsive and required a system reboot. On login I could not log in with either the new or old user password.

To replicate:

1) Login to an account and change the account's password.
2 ) Change the password again
3) Change the password again. After three or four times the change password prompt may begin to hang as you submit the new password. Exiting the change password window or rebooting the system while this window is in a hung state may corrupt the user account, preventing login.

After the user account is corrupted login is not possible. It is also not possible to decrypt the user's home directory as the ecryptfs-mount-private command gives an error about the package not being set up correctly, preventing decryption.

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

Confirmed. This doesn't occur everytime, but for some weird reason the dialog hangs, and the password is set to something such as:
$6$X/OldoQr$HxKsor.mQesg6EXrtIZqEHK4wKm718YVDowpV97Gm60L8rwfz07moFvNneQzmFqDGB5kv9yR6cWlEbdAc619y.
which seems to be invalid because running 'passwd' doesn't ask for the old password. It's likely that something is going wrong while users-admin runs 'passwd' in the background.

I could not reproduce the problem with gnome-about-me nor direct use of 'passwd', but I wasn't able to reproduce the problem twice with users-admin either.

But how the hell have you discovered this bug? Are you trying to get developers mad? ;-) I set priority to Medium only because it's very unlikely users will ever trigger this bug.

Note to reporter to fix his system: just run 'sudo passwd $USERNAME' if you're able to log in from another admin, or run this command from the recovery mode (choice at boot). Then setting the password to its last valid value may fix the eCryptfs issue too.

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

Additional note: before debugging users-admin further, we should determine whether we can reproduce the bug by running 'passwd' from commandline. If the real bug is in 'passwd', that would explain why the password got corrupt, which is hard to understand if only users-admin hung.

[BMR777 (rusnakweb)]

This seems to happen if you go to System > Preferences > About Me and change the password, but does not happen if it is changed under the user accounts dialog. It happened to me again today, on a NEW user account other than the one that originally experienced the issue. On the first attempt to change the password on this account it just hung and then the password was never changed. I was able to change it via user accounts OK but then when I rebooted I needed to enter in my OLD password into a gnome-keyring prompt.

I tried the instructions given at the Root Shell to reset the account's password and was not prompted for the current account password. When I tried the instructions (before you posted, found them online) I didn't use the same password I had previously which may have been why I couldn't decrypt my documents.

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

Hmm. You reported the bug against the gnome-system-tools, so I thought that was a bug in users-admin - actually, you first experienced it with gnome-about-me, which is in gnome-control-center. But I can confirm it happens with users-admin, which partly uses the same code.

OTOH you say you've been able to reproduce it when creating an account, which means this happens *with users-admin, and the first time it's changed*, which changes the description of the issue. Then you say you were able to change it via user accounts (i.e. users-admin): so what? Do you mean users-admin hung when changing password for the new account (i.e. at account creation time), but changed the password correctly the second time you tried? And then what about gnome-keyring: how can it have asked you for your old password, since you were not able to set it for the new user (i.e. it was empty)?

I'd like you to create a 'test' account and try changing the password many times using 'su test' and then 'passwd', as many times as you want. If the tool hangs at some point, or displays a message different than other times, we'll have an important information.

Note that the code used to change your own password is not the same as the code used to change other user's passwords. So you can't get the same hang in both.

[BMR777 (rusnakweb)]

No, let me clear a few things up. This did not happen when creating a new account, I simply mentioned that after I created a new account, logged in to that account and tried changing the password the same thing happened again. I have NOT had any trouble with passwords and creating a new account, only with changing the password of the current account while logged in.

The Gnome-Keyring error happened when I was inside of the user account and then changed the password for that account. I first tried changing it through about-me, which hung. Then after that window hung for a few minutes and I killed it then I went to user accounts and changed my password through there. When I rebooted and logged in to the same account for which I had just changed the password I was required to enter in my previous account password into gnome-keyring. I now have to do this on every reboot, enter in the old password into gnome-keyring.

I'll have to give that a try, creating the test account. I'll let you know how that goes... :)

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

Ah, thanks for the clarification!

So:
- have you ever experienced this bug with users-admin?
- have you ever been able to change your password successfully using gnome-about-me?
- have you installed special password or PAM packages such as pam-cracklib?
- is the fact that you change the password many times in the same session really a factor of the bug?

Please ensure you are always using the same sequence of passwords when changing them, since there can be differences depending on the order you type them (e.g. two similar passwords will lead 'passwd' to act differently, which can explain the hang).

(The gnome-keyring bug can be fixed by running Applications->Accessories->Keyrings and Encryption Keys, and changing the password for the problematic keyring.)

[BMR777 (rusnakweb)]

- No, users-admin does not give me issues and does not hang or corrupt the password.
- Yes, I was able to change it, once, using about-me.
- No, no special password packages installed.
- No, it does not seem the amount of times the password is changed is a factor. I thought it was at first, but on a new user account the first time I went to change my password, ever, on that account the about-me dialog hung.

Thanks. :)

[BMR777 (rusnakweb)]

Ok, I've done some more testing and I may have information that may help.

First, I can now confirm that in both about-me and user accounts the change password dialog hangs.

I tried changing the password via the passwd command in the terminal. If I try and change the password for the user account to a new password that contains any part of the old password I get a message that the new password cannot be the same as the old password.

For instance, if my old password was "password123" and my new password is "password456" I get the "The old password cannot be the same as the new password" error using the passwd command.

If, however I do sudo passwd it allows me to change the password from "password123" to "password456" ok.

Maybe that is why the dialogs hang? Hopefully this helps you solve the issue. :)

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

Fix committed upstream, to be released with gnome-system-tools 2.30.2.

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

Both packages have this bug fixed in Maverick (2.32).

[eraserix (eraserix)]

When will this be fixed in lucid?

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

I can't speak for packagers, but given the experience on this kind of bug, I'd say never, unless somebody steps up and posts a debdiff.