CUPS/PAM configuration authentication problem.

[Steve Randall]

On Fri, 11 Dec 2009 14:44:12 +0000
David Southwell <david at vizion2000.net> wrote:

> 
> Hi
>  Thanks to some help from people on the freebsd-questions lists  I have
>  finally succeeded in getting cups the server to communicate with my
>  printer and print.
>  HOWEVER!!
> 
>  One minor niggling problem remains. I still cannot communicate with the
>  cups management interface on http://localhost:631 due to password
>  authentication failure. 

<snip>
> 
> On good authority I believe I have a PAM configuration error most likely - and 
> was told to check my  /etc/pam.d/cups file. Not that I would know what to do 
> with it when I found it!!!
> 
> However there is no /etc/pam.d/cups file !!
> 
> BUT: there is a /usr/local/etc/pam.d/cups 
> 
> which has the following lines:
> auth    required        pam_unknown.so nodelay
> account required        pam_unknown.so

I looked at the cups configuration script, and it appears you have
found a bug in configuring the PAM option. (Which defaults to "off", so
it probably isn't tested much.) Where the file says "pam_unknown.so" it
should say "pam_unix.so". Make that simple change and you should be up
and running.

But if you don't know what to do with the PAM file, you might as well
just rebuild cups-base with the PAM option turned back off. You don't
need PAM if all you want is normal Unix authentication.

HTH