SSH Password Failure

Question

I'm having trouble logging into my server via a password, even when I explicitly set the user's password via usermod. I've set PasswordAuthentication yes in my sshd_config and restarted the ssh daemon. I've even set the user's password multiple times. However when I try to login to my server, sshd shows the following log output:

Jan 24 21:18:31 ip-10-36-13-72 sshd[11756]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=173.12.2.64 user=jimuser Jan 24 21:18:34 ip-10-36-13-72 sshd[11756]: Failed password for jimuser from 173.12.2.64 port 15508 ssh2 

At this point I'm not really sure where to look. Any ideas?

UPDATE:

/etc/pam.d/sshd

#%PAM-1.0 auth required pam_sepermit.so auth include password-auth account required pam_nologin.so account include password-auth password include password-auth # pam_selinux.so close should be the first session rule session required pam_selinux.so close session required pam_loginuid.so # pam_selinux.so open should only be followed by sessions to be executed in the user context session required pam_selinux.so open env_params session optional pam_keyinit.so force revoke session include password-auth 

/etc/pam.d/system-auth

#%PAM-1.0 # This file is auto-generated. # User changes will be destroyed the next time authconfig is run. auth required pam_env.so auth sufficient pam_unix.so try_first_pass nullok auth required pam_deny.so account required pam_unix.so password requisite pam_cracklib.so try_first_pass retry=3 type= password sufficient pam_unix.so try_first_pass use_authtok nullok sha512 shadow password required pam_deny.so session optional pam_keyinit.so revoke session required pam_limits.so session [success=1 default=ignore] pam_succeed_if.so service in crond quiet use_uid session required pam_unix.so 

Answer 1

The first thing to do is to try setting the password for the user using the passwd command

# passwd jimuser Changing password for user jimuser. New password: Retype new password: passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully. 

If this works then all well and good but note that usermod takes a pre encrypted password string

-p, --password PASSWORD The encrypted password, as returned by crypt(3).

If you really do want to supply pre encrypted passwords then there are a variety of tools e.g. sha1pass (a perl script) grub-crypt (python) or take a look at the solutions here.