Recently I upgraded PAM on my Gentoo server to 0.99. There were a number of warnings that went with it, including details on upgrading some of the files manually (crazy). Details on the upgrade process are on the Gentoo website here. After the build, it recommends running revdep-rebuild to rebuild the dependencies. At that point, I tested to make sure I could still logon to my box, and mail was still operating. I went to bed, and left the server alone.
That was a month, or so, ago. Today, whilst working on migrating more of the domains on my server, I stumbled across a weird entry in my log file.
Mar 2 19:21:01 titan cron[8305]: PAM adding faulty module: /lib/security/pam_unix.so
Mar 2 19:21:01 titan cron[8305]: PAM unable to dlopen(/lib/security/pam_limits.so)
Mar 2 19:21:01 titan cron[8305]: PAM [dlerror: /lib/security/pam_limits.so: symbol
pam_syslog, version LIBPAM_EXTENSION_1.0 not defined in file libpam.so.0 with
link time reference]
Mar 2 19:21:01 titan cron[8305]: PAM adding faulty module: /lib/security/pam_limits.so
Mar 2 19:21:01 titan cron[8305]: Module is unknown
It seemed a little strange, but I didn’t remember revdep-rebuild requesting vixie-cron be rebuilt. Pulling qdepends out of the toolkit, I found a few more apps that needed rebuilding…
qdepends -Q pam
This listed several apps that needed upgrading…
app-admin/sudo-1.6.8_p9 mail-mta/postfix-2.4.5 app-misc/screen-4.0.3 net-ftp/ftpbase-0.01 net-ftp/proftpd-1.3.1_rc2-r3 sys-process/vixie-cron-4.1-r10 sys-apps/shadow-4.0.18.1-r1 net-libs/courier-authlib-0.58 net-mail/cyrus-imapd-2.2.12-r4 net-misc/openssh-4.7_p1-r1 dev-libs/cyrus-sasl-2.1.22-r2
This showed a number of packages that needed to be rebuilt. After rebuilding vixie-cron (emerge vixie-cron), and restarting it (/etc/init.d/vixie-cron restart), everything went quiet again… Just the usual logs.