Why Can’t I Login?!

If you’ve reached this page, you’re having issues logging into your system with a newly created account.

In almost all cases, this is because either your user has not been placed in a group allowed to access the system, your DNS is setup incorrectly, or your PKI certificates are invalid.

PAM Access Restrictions

By default, SIMP uses the pam_access.so PAM module to restrict access on each individual host. While this may not seem as flexible as some methods, it is the most failsafe method for ensuring that you don’t accidentally interrupt services due to network issues connecting to your LDAP server.

To allow a user to access a particular system, you need to use the pam::access::manage define as shown below.

pam::access::manage { 'Allow the security group into the system':
  users   => ['(security)'],
  origins => ['ALL'],
  comment => 'The core security team'
}

pam::access::manage { 'Allow bob into the system from the proxy only':
  users   => ['bob'],
  origins => ["proxy.${::domain}"],
  comment => 'Bob the proxied'
}

Troubleshooting DNS

If PAM is not the issue, you may be having DNS issues. This can evidence itself in two ways.

First, per the ‘Bob’ example above, you may be using an FQDN to identify a host on your network. If DNS is not properly configured, then there is no way for the host to understand that you should have access from this remote system.

Second, the default PKI settings in SIMP ensure that all connections are validated against the FQDN of the client system. In the case of an LDAP connection, a misconfiguration in DNS may result in an inability to authenticate against the LDAP service.

In the following sections, we will assume that we have a host named ‘system.my.domain’ with the IP address ‘1.2.3.4’.

Testing a Forward Lookup

The following should return the expected IP address for your system.

$ nslookup system.my.domain

Testing a Reverse Lookup

The following should return the expected hostname for your system. This hostname must be either the primary name in the PKI certificate or a valid alternate name.

$ nslookup 1.2.3.4

PKI Issues

If both PAM and DNS appear to be correct, you should next validate that your PKI certificates are both valid and functional.

See Checking Your SIMP PKI Communication for additional guidance.