Why does SSH prompt for 2 passwords?

[Gary D Kline]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2003 at 03:02:23PM +0200, Willie Viljoen wrote:
> On Friday 18 April 2003 0:48, someone, possibly Joe Lewis, typed:
> 
> > Password:
> > Response:
> > joe at 192.168.1.1's password:
> 
> The first prompt is PAM challenge response authentication. This uses the PAM 
> system instead of a just a flat read of /etc/master.passwd to authenticate, 
> and is also more secure than standard plaintext authentication.
> 
> Unless your sshd is misconfigured, your configuration files and binaries are 
> out of sync (this happend when a system is upgraded without doing 
> mergemaster), this should not be happening, and you should be able to log 
> in at the first prompt. It might also be that the ssh client you are using 
> does not handle challenge response authentication properly.
> 
> If you are happy with standard plaintext configuration, you may edit 
> /etc/ssh/sshd_config and change the setting to this:
> 
> # Change to no to disable PAM authentication
> ChallengeResponseAuthentication no
> 
> I'd recommend you rather get PAM fixed though, or use public key 
> authentication instead, that's much more secure than any form of password 
> authentication.
> 

	I've bumped into this ssh problem myself when I try to reach
	sites outside my LAN, and it probably is a PAM authentication
	on my DNS server.   I've got to check that I mermastered the 
	4.8 pam file, but if that doesn't resolve this, can you tell 
	me how else to fix the problem?

	thanks,

	gary



-- 
   Gary Kline     kline at thought.org   www.thought.org     Public service Unix