Too many logins - sessions not cleared

[Kyoku]

Ubuntu 11.10 server example:

When I configure user ice to allow only 3 logins logged out SSH sessions are not being cleared.

/etc/security/limits.conf

ice hard maxlogins 3

The user ice can login and logout many times without problem but if they login 3 times and hit the maxlogins limit then logout of all sessions the user can't log back in again even though there are zero logged in sessions.

/var/log/auth.log

pam_unix(sshd:session): session opened for user ice by (uid=0)
pam_limits(sshd:session): Too many logins (max 3) for ice

PAM reports too many logins even though the user ice has no current logins.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

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[Kyoku (kyoku)]

I don't know which package it relates to.

[Kyoku (kyoku)]

After some more research it seems this may be libpam-modules package.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

pam_limits only checks the contents of utmp to count logins, it doesn't write login entries to the file. If openssh is failing to clean up its login records, that's an openssh issue.

[Clint Byrum (clint-fewbar)]

I just tried to reproduce this on Ubuntu 12.04 (beta2) and it did not happen. So perhaps this is only on 11.10?

Kyoku, can you try to reproduce on 12.04?