BlueOnyx 5106R - Unresponsive Login Manager

BlueOnyx uses the PAM ABL module to mitigate brute force attacks. Though it’s not a good idea to rely solely on this module to protect your services, it’s definitely better than nothing. However, for some reason the database storing the failed hosts and users tends to corrupt easily on BlueOnyx systems.

If you experience that you can’t access the “Login Manager” or the “Failed Logins” section from the GUI due to timeouts, then the aforementioned corruption is a likely cause. Another sign of corruption would be the inability to purge the list of failed logins. If this is the case, then PAM ABL might not be functioning at all.

To address this issue you may simply delete the blacklist databases by issuing the following commands.

rm /var/lib/abl/hosts.db
rm /var/lib/abl/users.db
# Restart cced
/etc/init.d/cced.init restart

Deleting the databases is harmless as they are recreated automatically.