Running RH5 with openldap-2.3.43. We have a script that pulls ssha passwords from a ldap server out of our control. So when a user updates their passwords on that server, the script pulls the password periodically and updates our ldap servers so users can use our ldap servers with posix attributes to authenticate to systems using ldap and pam settings. We need to inactivate accounts after a period of inactivity. We can do this using the shadowInactive attribute in ldap that is based on when the user password expired. So the issue we have is that when the user logs into a system and their accounts are expired they can enter a new password and our ldap servers our updated with the new password, but when the script runs at a later time, the password is reset back to whatever is in the ldap server we pull passwords from. We would like users to not be able to change their password using the password command. We can accomplish this in a few ways including: 1. pam_password_prohibit_message in ldap.conf 2. Just commenting out the ldap module in pam that controls password updates. The problem is that we have a small group of users that are added manually that we would like to be able to change their passwords using the passwd command. The above will impact all users. We are looking for suggestions on how to handle the above. We thought of the following: 1. Use the ppolocy overlay and create a default policy for all users that sets pwdAllowUserChange to no and then create individual policies to that allow certain users to change their pass. In this method, what happens to all the shadow attributes, are they overwridden by the ppolicy. I don't see anything regarding Inactive accounts in ppolicy like the shadowInactive attribute. 2. Could we accomplish this by figuring out a ACL in slapd.conf that only users with a special attribute value are able to write to the userPassword attribute? Any other suggestions?