HP-UX 11.11, if ftp account password expires, doesn't prompt to change

[Mark Blonde]

Good afternoon All of you,
I was wondering if you can help me, we have many hp-ux 11.11 servers with ftp accounts. When the ftp accounnt password expires, we have no way of knowing and therefore when we attempt to connect, it failes the connection instead of simply asking for a new password. (Like every other program does.)

Please help me with this one, i looked at /etc/ftpd/ftpaccess but couldn't find an entry that would prompt to change password.

[James A. Donovan · Accepted solution]

In order to change the account passwd, the FTP daemon would need to be able to call the getpwent functions, and the FTP client would need to be able to understand what to do. I don't think there are any FTP clients capable of doing this, nor any FTP servers capable either.

You'll need to login to the FTP server and update the passwords yourself. If these are FTP-only accounts, then set the passwords to never expire.

[Steven E. Protter]

ftp servers can't handle the update process. Worse than that the error message returned doesn't even lead you to understand a password reset is required.

Thats the way it works.

I have a script scan for expired passwords and email the user instructing them to telnet/ssh in. Under that scenario they get prompted to change the password.

SEP

[Mark Blonde]

Could you post your script please ?

[Bill Hassell]

It's easy to think that ftp is sort of like telnet but you don't actually login with ftp. The ftp server simply authenticates the user and provides an ftp prompt. You get no shell and there are no commands in the ftpd server code that can affect the password storage. For ftp-only accounts, automatic notification is required. Actually, I would use cron to run a password expiration check every few hours. HINT: man getprpw, specifically the lockout value. NOTE: 11.11 has the man page, all others need to go to docs.hp.com for the man page.