Passwd Changing Acting Strange

Hello. I'm getting very odd behavior when I try to change a user's password in Solaris 8. The shell, where it used to ask for a new passwd and a confirmation, now asks FOUR times, with two success message.

This is what happens every time:

# passwd myusername
New Password: xxxxxxxx
New Password: xxxxxxxx
Re-enter new Password: xxxxxxxx
passwd: password successfully changed for myusername
Re-enter new Password: xxxxxxxx
passwd: password successfully changed for myusername
#

The passwd program seems identical (bytewise) to others that do not have this problem, and it happens under any shell (sh, bash, etc). Everything else seems to be working normally.

What the heck?

The passwd program has very little influence over the events that happen when a password is changed. Sun uses pam (plugable authentication modules (or something like that)). Actually, I believe that Sun invented pam, but I'm not real sure about that. Pam is a collection of shared libraries and they may have changed. But also there is a pam.conf which would be the first file that I would check.

Correct Perderabo, proposed in 1995 in this RFC to the OSF.