about-me control center applet freezes forever when I'm trying to change password

[Mantas Kriaučiūnas]

I've set password of one user in my system to empty (removed all symbols in
/etc/shadow password field) and told him, that he must change password when he
will login first time. After few days this user told, that he can't change
password, because about-me control center applet freezes forever when I'm trying
to change password :(
This bug is 100% reproducible:

1. login with some user
2. removed all symbols in /etc/shadow password field for that user
3. Choose System->Settings->"About Me" and then press on "Change Password.." button
4. Don't enter anything in "Old password" field (because password is empty - try
to login in console for testing) and enter new password twice.

Actual results:

About-me control center applet freezes forever when trying to change password

Expected tesults:

1. About-me control center applet's "Change Password" dialog should'nt ask for
old password if there are no password (password is empty) - "Change Password"
dialog shouldn't display field "Old password" or this field should be disabled
in this dialog if there are no password (password is empty). Command-line tool
for password changing - passwd command does exactly what user expect - it
doesn't ask for old password (current password), when password is empty.
2. About-me control center applet should'nt freeze forever when trying to change
password :)

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

Thanks for your bug report. Which version of Ubuntu and gnome-control-center do
you use?

[Mantas Kriaučiūnas (mantas)]

I'm using Ubuntu 5.10 and gnome-control-center from Ubuntu 5.10
(2.12.1-0ubuntu2). Why are you asking about version ? Did you tried to reproduce
this bug ?

[Guillaume Desmottes (cassidy)]

I can reproduce this bug with g-c-c 2.14 (Dapper)

[Mantas Kriaučiūnas (mantas)]

It would be nice to fix this bug in Baltix GNU/Linux distro in this summer

[Lance Russell (lrussell)]

Still here in Ubuntu 7.10, gutsy.

The problem occurs when the user attempts to change their password to one that is not complex enough. I haven't gotten into the code but it seems there is an expect script or something of the sort that is waiting for passwd to come back with success.

As an aside, it would be real nice if there was a graphical way for administrators to set minimum password lengths through user-admin.

[Lance Russell (lrussell)]

Attached is a diff file that should squash this bug and prevent if from recurring.
Modified the error checking.
 Previously, the response from /usr/bin/passwd was checked against
 a list of known values, i.e. short, palindrome, etc. and custom
 error messages were displayed. As the responses from passwd have
 changed, errors were not being caught. Notably, when a too-short
 password was entered the application would hang. Now it checks for
 "successfully", a newline or NULL. "successfully" proceeds as normal
 while anything else with a newline is displayed verbatim.

 Also added a status image to show user success when password changed.
Most of the diff file is to rebuild gnome-about-me.glade with Glade 3.4.0

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

fixed upstream, thanks.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the bug should be fixed in hardy now

[Mantas Kriaučiūnas (mantas)]

Adomas, could you verify if user with empty password can change password in Baltix 3.8.1 and Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04?

[Kzin (wmkzin)]

In Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04 the case in post #5 still occurs.

Using the interface in System > Preferences> About Me> Change password
from (this is not my password, just for examples sake)
br1Um&2
to
br1Um&3
Hangs. This is likely because the old password is too much like the new password. However, you can get around it by changing
br1Um&2
to
dog22cat#
then to
br1Um&3
I guess the issue is that the user is not notified about the password issue and the interface hangs.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Kzin may you please open a new bug about it? Thanks in advance.

[ghomem (gustavo)]

Trial patch that works with winbind + Active Directory auth available here:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=608234