For some time I’ve been making use of the wonderful Xvnc Terminal Server Howto created by LinuxReviews.org. Unfortunately it appears as if the most recent update to pam from the gentoo portage has created an authentication issue. I’m able to log into the system locally and via ssh fine, however attempts to connect to VNC time out while loading the window manager. I keep getting the following error from pam after each attempt:
[PAM-env] Unknown PAM_ITEM:
The Gentoo Forums posting 251453 contains a workaround for the issue, which simply states to remove the “DISPLAY” and “XAUTHORITY” line in /etc/security/pam_env.conf.