[BlueOnyx:06544] Re: Problem with pam_abl

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Michael,

> OK, so I have 4 identically setup BlueOnyx servers. One developed a strange
> problem today. 
> When I go to “Failed Logins” or “Login Manager” in the GUI it will appear
> to hang there for up to 5 min. Eventually it will come up but during the 5
> min cced will be consumed dealing with that and I can’t change any user
> passwords or do anything else. Looking at the running processes it appears
> that pam_abl_import.sh is taking a huge amount of time to run. 
> I tired hitting the “purge events” button but that did not help.

I've recently run into a similar issue at a client's box. So please try these 
steps:

As root and from the console run this command:

/etc/init.d/pam_abl status

It should show a list of blocked hosts and users and also the date and time of 
the events. Check this output for two things:

a) You should see no error message that indicate a corruption of the PAM_ABL 
database.

b) You should see no events older than say a week.

If you see events older than a week OR get an error message that indicates a 
corruption of the PAM_ABL database. Like in the case that I had recently, the 
corruption of the database no longer allowed removal of old records, so the 
PAM_ABL lists got so long that the GUI literally choked on processing and 
displaying them.

To fix this issue run these two commands:

rm /var/lib/abl/hosts.db
rm /var/lib/abl/users.db

That will delete the PAM_ABL databases. They will get recreated automatically, 
so no worries there. Then restart CCEd for good measure and check the PAM_ABL 
blocks again in the GUI:

/etc/init.d/cced.init restart

That should fix it.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber