Mastering Linux Security and Hardening - Second Edition

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 ...