maxlogins

[Alan McKinnon]

On Saturday 29 April 2006 19:23, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm trying to understand the 'maxlogins' option in
> /etc/security/limits.conf
>
> As usual in Linux world, the documentation is less than stellar.
> I've found a dozen documents and they are really a dozen copies of
> the same document. They all say the same thing:
>
> maxlogins -- Maximum number of logins for this user or group.
>
> Okay... so does that mean that if I set "maxlogins  5" then the
> user can only login 5 times in their life and then they can never
> login again? Or does it mean that they can only do 5 login attempts
> wrong? If so, does the system ever reset to let them them login
> again? How long does that take?

It's the number of simultaneous logins that user can have open at the 
same time. With maxlogins = 5, then as soon as the user tries to open 
a 6th session, it will be disallowed. Note:

pam accepts the user name & passwd, checks the password, and then only 
checks limits.conf to allow/disallow the login

tty, konsole, su - and su sessions all count towards the limit

-- 
If only you and dead people understand hex, 
how many people understand hex?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five