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To: Gianmarco Giovannelli <gmarco@scotty.masternet.it>
cc: questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: poppassd doesn't let to change the password 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 13 Mar 1997 09:54:27 +0100."
             <3.0.1.32.19970313095427.007715ac@scotty.masternet.it> 
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 1997 06:07:27 -0800
Message-ID: <514.858175647@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
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> I have installed the poppassd 4.0 on a 2.2 GAMMA box with popper 2.2 running.
> 
> I follow every instructions on the readme file, but every user that try to
> change his password  receive the error from eudora : Sorry I couldn't
> change your password etc etc...

This was already reported recently in hackers (and, to be honest,
I've even known about it myself for a few months - I tried to get
poppassd running back in January and ran into this same problem.

The issue is that `passwd' is being run by poppassd at the end of a
pipe, with poppassd trying to send the new password down the pipe to
it.  This part actually works, and the password file is modified, but
then the passwd program never exits (or exits with an error status - I
can't remember which) and so poppassd returns an error.

In other words, the communication between poppassd and passwd(1) has
broken somehow (and I'm told it used to work before 2.2) so somebody
needs to fix it.  I didn't have time, myself, and if I were to try and
rewrite this thing I'd simply steal the code out of passwd(1) and try
to make poppassd stand-alone. :)

					Jordan