LDM should display a message when the user makes an error in his password instead of restarting

[Guillaume Pratte]

Binary package hint: ldm

Currently, when using ssh to connect, LDM is designed to restart when any kind of error happens, might it be that the server is not responding or that a user misses her password.

LDM behavior is universal in these situation : it displays "no response from server, restarting" and restarts, leaving the impression to the user that something is wrong with the system when she has just made an error in her password.

Should not LDM be made to differentiate both cases (wrong password VS system failure), and simply display an error message to the user when the password is invalid, without restarting itself completely?

[Stéphane Graber (stgraber)]

We need a reliable way to know if the login failure comes from a server issue (unresponsive, bad ssh configuration) or a user issue (expired password, wrong password).
As we currently have to parse SSH's output and this one's varying between versions and locales, it's not possible to do so at the moment. This bug will only be fixed once we have a reliable way to know the SSH answer on all distros and with different locales, something like libssh (once it's fully implemented).
I'm marking the bug as wishlist.

[Jakob Unterwurzacher (jakobunt)]

Looking at the openssh source code it seems like
(1) The error message for a wrong password, "Permission denied", is not localized
(2) It has not changed since 2001
See line 445 on https://github.com/SimonWilkinson/openssh/blame/master/sshconnect2.c (github mirror of the openssh cvs)

Also in libssh, it seems like you also get just an error string that you have to parse yourself, see http://api.libssh.org/master/group__libssh__error.html . So libssh probably won't make it a lot easier.

I have written a patch so the ssh error message is recorded and show to the user (in bug 1325388). Localization is missing, but it basically does what the bug reporter wants, so I am marking this bug as a duplicate.