Screen Saver won't unlock under KDE and NIS

A few months ago (as I write this on 1/11/2001) I set up NIS on my home network (6 Linux machines, running Mandrake 7.1). All worked well, except that I could no longer unlock my kde screen saver.

I searched deja.com, and found that I was not the only one with this problem, but I found no solution that worked. I set it aside, since I didn't need to lock my screen at home.

Today, as I was working on a new Linux Image for work (based on RedHat 6.2) I ran into the same problem. I solved it at work, then tried again at home. It turned out to be a different problem at each location.

At home, I solved it by changing one line in /etc/pam.d/kde

From:

auth       required     /lib/security/pam_pwdb.so shadow nullok

To:

auth       required     /lib/security/pam_pwdb.so nullok

At work, the problem was that under HPUX and Solaris, I use ksh for a shell. Since the Linux machine did not have ksh (nor did I want to add it!), and I did not want to change my shell in the NIS maps, I made a link from bash to ksh. I did not think to add /bin/ksh to /etc/shells. This did not prevent log-ins, but did prevent the screen from being unlocked. I added /bin/ksh to /etc/shells, and all was well.

I just checked /etc/pam.d/kde on my Mandrake 7.1 machines, it does not check /etc/shells like RedHat 6.2 does.