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r/sysadmin • … • u/jmbpiano

Is RADIUS auth broken in Debian 13?

I'm trying to upgrade some of our servers to the latest stable version of Debian and running into a problem with authentication via the module in the `libpam-radius-auth` package.

Whenever I activate the RADIUS module with the `pam-auth-update` command, any subsequent `sudo` commands fail with:

sudo: PAM account management error: Module is unknown sudo: a password is required

After turning on PAM debug logging, I'm seeing the following error (usernames changed) that seems to point to the module attempting to use a non-existent library symbol:

sudo[1585]: PAM unable to resolve symbol: pam_sm_acct_mgmt sudo[1585]: PAM unable to resolve symbol: pam_sm_acct_mgmt sudo[1585]: jmbpiano : PAM account management error: Module is unknown ; TTY=pts/0 ; PWD=/home/jmbpiano ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/sbin/pam-auth-update

I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure out if I'm doing something wrong. My latest step was to spin up an entirely virgin VM, install Debian 13 on it with a freshly-downloaded netinst ISO and configure *nothing* on it except for sudo and the radius PAM module. I'm getting the exact same result.

I know this is a bit of a niche problem, but I'm hoping if *anyone* else has run into this, it will be my fellow sysadmins.

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