Mastering Linux Security and Hardening

Hands-on lab for configuring pam_tally2

Configuring pam_tally2 is super easy because it only requires adding one line to the /etc/pam.d/login file. To make things even easier, you can just copy and paste that line from the example in the pam_tally2 man page. In spite of what I said earlier about bumping the number of failed logins up to 100, we'll keep that number at 4 for now. (I know that you don't want to have to do 100 failed logins in order to demo this.)

1. On either the CentOS or the Ubuntu virtual machine, open the /etc/pam.d/login file for editing. Look for the line that invokes the pam_securetty module. (That should be around line 32 on Ubuntu and around line 2 on CentOS.)

Beneath that line, insert the following line:

 auth required ...