FAILLOG

Section: Maintenance Commands (8)
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NAME

faillog - examine faillog and set login failure limits

SYNOPSIS

faillog [-u login-name] [-a] [-t days]: [-m max] [-pr]

DESCRIPTION

faillog formats the contents of the failure log, /var/log/faillog, and maintains failure counts and limits. The order of the arguments to faillog is significant. Each argument is processed immediately in the order given.

OPTIONS

The -p flag causes failure entries to be printed in UID order. Entering -u login-name flag will cause the failure record for login-name only to be printed. Entering -t days will cause only the failures more recent than days to be printed. The -t flag overrides the use of -u. The -a flag causes all users to be selected. When used with the -p flag, this option selects all users who have ever had a login failure. It is meaningless with the -r flag.

The -r flag is used to reset the count of login failures. Write access to /var/log/faillog is required for this option. Entering -u login-name will cause only the failure count for login-name to be reset.

The -m flag is used to set the maximum number of login failures before the account is disabled. Write access to /var/log/faillog is required for this option. Entering -m max will cause all accounts to be disabled after max failed logins occur. This may be modified with -u login-name to limit this function to login-name only. Selecting a max value of 0 has the effect of not placing a limit on the number of failed logins. The maximum failure count should always be 0 for root to prevent a denial of services attack against the system.

Options may be combined in virtually any fashion. Each -p, -r, and -m option will cause immediate execution using any -u or -t modifier.

CAVEATS

faillog only prints out users with no successful login since the last failure. To print out a user who has had a successful login since their last failure, you must explicitly request the user with the -u flag, or print out all users with the -a flag.

FILES

/var/log/faillog - failure logging file

AUTHOR

Julianne Frances Haugh (jockgrrl@ix.netcom.com)