Install & configuration of Poppasswd server on CentOS 5.2

1. Download Poppassd Daemon for Centos 5 Distro from here- http://rpm.razorsedge.org/centos-5/RE/poppassd-1.8.5-3.el5.re.i386.rpm

2. Install using “rpm -U poppassd-1.8.5-3.el5.re.i386.rpm“

3. goto /etc/xinetd.d/

4. Edit poppassd file like the following-

# default: off
# description: This program is based on original Qualcomm password changer daemon \
#              dedicated for, well, changing system passwords over network.
service poppassd
{
disable    = no
socket_type        = stream
protocol        = tcp
port            = 106
wait            = no
user            = root
instances        = 1000
flags            = KEEPALIVE
server            = /usr/sbin/poppassd
log_on_success    += HOST DURATION
log_on_failure    += HOST
}

5. Restart Xinetd service

6. Telnet from your server-

telnet localhost 106

You should see something like below-

login as: root
root@192.168.0.103’s password:
Last login: Sun Dec  7 15:50:11 2008 from 192.168.0.97
[root@ns3 ~]# telnet localhost 106
Trying 127.0.0.1…
Connected to localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1).
Escape character is ‘^]’.
200 poppassd v1.8.5 hello, who are you?
user dhaka
200 Your password please.
pass

Walla! your poppasswd is running

7. Now comes a crucial part!!! Here began my problem, then you set everything right, every time I connect to the service to make it work, the server gave me the following error:

[root @ ns3 ~] # poppassd
200 poppassd v1.8.5 hello, who are you? 200 poppassd v1.8.5 hello, who are you?
user alex user alex
200 Your password please. 200 Your password please.
pass abcdefg pass abcdefg
500 Old password is incorrect. 500 Old password is incorrect.

After spending plenty of hours the findings were in the file /etc/pam.d/poppassd-

[root @ ns3 ~] [/ etc / pam.d> cat / etc / pam.d / poppassd
#%PAM-1.0 #% PAM-1.0
auth required /lib/security/pam_pwdb.so shadow nullok auth required / lib / security / pam_pwdb.so shadow nullok
account required /lib/security/pam_pwdb.so account required / lib / security / pam_pwdb.so
password required /lib/security/pam_cracklib.so retry=3 password required / lib / security / pam_cracklib.so retry = 3
password required /lib/security/pam_pwdb.so use_authtok nullok password required / lib / security / pam_pwdb.so use_authtok nullok

I realized that the libraries security / lib / security / pam_pwdb.so no longer came with CentOS, as I had to replace it with this-

[root @ ns3 ~] [/ etc / pam.d> cat / etc / pam.d / poppassd
#%PAM-1.0 #% PAM-1.0
auth required /lib/security/pam_unix_auth.so shadow nullok auth required / lib / security / pam_unix_auth.so shadow nullok
account required /lib/security/pam_unix_acct.so account required / lib / security / pam_unix_acct.so
password required /lib/security/pam_cracklib.so retry=3 password required / lib / security / pam_cracklib.so retry = 3
password required /lib/security/pam_unix_passwd.so use_authtok nullok password required / lib / security / pam_unix_passwd.so use_authtok nullok

Now the poppasswd is ready to work with Horde passwd or Squirrelmail user passwd or any web based custom user password scripts!! 🙂