MDM7.1 SP04 on RHEL5 - Password for sidadm doesn't authenticate

[richard_howard]

I was installing MDM7.1 SP04 and sapinst prompted me to input the password for <sid>adm. I would provide the correct password but sapinst would fail and say incorrect password. This was on a Red Hat 5 install and I could successfully logon as <sid>adm with the same password that I provided to sapinst.

We use VAS (Vintela Authentication Service) to validate the credentials of our named users against Active Directory but <sid>adm is a service account that is not configured to use VAS so it should be validating it's credentials locally.

[richard_howard]

This is caused by a bug in VAS.

Bug 16296

• vastool: Running vastool configure pam would break symlinks on /etc/pam.conf

or /etc/pam.d/<service files>.

My workaround was to have VAS uninstalled/configured, run sapinst to complete my MDM7.1 install, and then have VAS reinstalled. The correction to this bug has not been released as of July 6, 2010.

Hope this helps. It drove me nuts for five weeks trying to get sapinst to work, when it really had nothing to do with SAP or Red Hat.