Tried the "ktrace -di su - USER -c /usr/bin/passwd" but still do not
understand why the user is getting a "permission" denied.

 The "passwd" section in the trace does only show four errors:

 22352 passwd   NAMI  "/etc/malloc.conf"
 22352 passwd   RET   readlink -1 errno 2 No such file or directory

and

 22352 passwd   NAMI  "/etc/krb5.conf"
 22352 passwd   RET   open -1 errno 2 No such file or directory
 22352 passwd   CALL  break(0x8051000)

and two times:

 22352 passwd   CALL  ioctl(0x3,TIOCGETA,0xbfbfd428)
 22352 passwd   RET   ioctl -1 errno 25 Inappropriate ioctl for device

 It does read /etc/spwd.db successfully after all the above errors,
though. Last thing it is doing before exiting is loading the NLS-files.


 Is there any config file I am missing? nsswitch.conf? passwd.conf? Where
would one set permissions to alter passwords?

--
Markus Illenseer