Comment 4 for bug 203881

Steve Langasek wrote on 2008-03-26:

> What is the value of the password field within /etc/passwd? A value of "x" tells pam_unix that it should look in
> /etc/shadow; I don't think this is a regression.

In my case there indeed was an 'x'. But the user was missing in /etc/shadow.

I guess the error reply from pam_unix is too hard to parse for mortal humans. I myself did not understand where the problem was, when I read the error message.

The problem in my case was that I was renaming a user manually and forgot to change it correctly in /etc/shadow. Thus there was a user entry in /etc/passwd but not in /etc/shadow.

I'd expect pam_unix to tell me: "There's no user $USER in /etc/shadow"

I'd say this report is rather a request for improvement of the error reporting by pam_unix.