Hi,
I’m running Manjaro with the Cinnamon desktop and I have the issue that if I lock my screen and try to log in after some minutes, I’m sometimes being told that I’ve already had 3 failed login attempts, locking additional tries for 10 minutes. In comparison to this forum post, I do not have any fingerprint sensor attached and also none of the mentioned screen savers are installed. Unfortunately, I don’t know when this issue first appeared, but it started for sure several months, maybe even one or two years ago.
I’ve also checked the journal entries for failed login attempts, the last ones are quite some time ago (the issue appeared last today):
Usually, if I need to wait for around 10 minutes, I instead just restart the PC and can then login again without any issues. Maybe something worth noting is that after waiting for 10+ minutes, the next login attempt always fails. One additional login finally unlocks my PC.
Does anyone maybe have an idea what the issue might be?
That is not what the result of checking journal entries looks like -
and:
please do not post pictures, but copy/paste text instead
(formatted as code → this button: </>)
journalctl (and options)
is the way to inspect the journal entries
You could go to a TTY, log in, and run journalctl -f there
for instance
(it continually prints new messages as they are added to the log)
or sift through the log in some other way
The standard recommendation is:
be sure your system is fully up to date
and all the .pacnew files are merged / taken care of
(one of those recently contained references to pam and fingerprint stuff …)
… gut, daß es sie gibt, die Wasseranomalie 
1 Like
If this is a desktop, try a different keyboard, this issue was happening to my brother, a while back, turned out to be a keyboard with stick keys. May be something else, but best to eliminate the basics.
Hey, thank you both for your suggestions!
I’ve looked into the journal entries, the following logs are there after I lost the ability to login when switching to the lock screen:
Mär 31 19:46:31 username-pc cinnamon-screensaver-pam-helper[48562]: pam_unix(cinnamon-screensaver:auth): conversation failed
Mär 31 19:46:31 username-pc cinnamon-screensaver-pam-helper[48562]: pam_unix(cinnamon-screensaver:auth): auth could not identify password for [username]
Mär 31 19:46:31 username-pc cinnamon-screensaver-pam-helper[48569]: pam_unix(cinnamon-screensaver:auth): conversation failed
Mär 31 19:46:31 username-pc cinnamon-screensaver-pam-helper[48569]: pam_unix(cinnamon-screensaver:auth): auth could not identify password for [username]
Mär 31 19:46:32 username-pc cinnamon-screensaver-pam-helper[48575]: pam_unix(cinnamon-screensaver:auth): conversation failed
Mär 31 19:46:32 username-pc cinnamon-screensaver-pam-helper[48575]: pam_unix(cinnamon-screensaver:auth): auth could not identify password for [username]
Mär 31 19:46:32 username-pc cinnamon-screensaver-pam-helper[48575]: pam_faillock(cinnamon-screensaver:auth): Consecutive login failures for user username account temporarily locked
I’ve found mentions of this issue[1], but on first glance none of the provided solutions are actual solutions without compromising the security of the system. I’ll look into it the next days to see if I can find more information (and possible solutions) on this issue. I’ll also have a look into these .pacnew files and how to merge them if necessary as I’ve stumbled upon these files in some of the links.
[1]: (I’m not allowed to add links to my post…)
StackOverflow: questions/57657645/pam-unixsudoauth-conversation-failed-auth-could-not-identify-password-for#57673222
Linux Mint Forum: viewtopic.php?t=406203
Arch Linux Forum (BBS): viewtopic.php?id=279082
Cinnamon Screensaver issue on Github: issues/209