View Source: pam_tally(8) - Waikato Linux Users Group

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The maintenance program for <tt>pam_tally.so</tt>. [pam_tally | http://www.baverstock.org.uk/tim/pam/] is a [PAM] module intended to deny further authentication attempts after a given count of failed authentications.

pam_tally(8) can list and reset the accumulated counts. Note that this only uses a local file (defaults to <tt>/var/adm/faillog</tt>) and has no facility to use [LDAP] or similar systems to combine results from several machines (or a cluster).

pam_tally provides a subset of the functionality of [pam_abl | http://www.hexten.net/pam_abl/], but where pam_tally simply counts failing usernames, pam_abl allows for:
* counting failing hosts as well as usernames (my logs show the same attacking hostnames trying lots of different usernames rather than the other way round)
* configurable time-based failures (e.g. record a failure if the user or host fails 5 times in an hour or 10 in a day)
* configurable time-based auto-purging of failure database

On the other hand, pam_abl seems to have 2 issues at the moment:
* some users (including TomGreen) report failures not being recorded in database (fixed in current [CVS] from SourceForge)
* an issue with OpenSSH [where failures don't seem to be recorded | http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=148927&atid=773100]

One page links to pam_tally(8):

Man8p

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Last edited on Friday, August 18, 2006 12:14:21 am by AristotlePagaltzis

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