We've got a customer on AIX 6.1 who unfortunately doesn't have an in house sys admin with any measure of experience or training, so we are supporting their server in addition to our software.

They have it set up in smitty (smit?), for the different users' passwords to expire every 4 weeks and have the time between expiration and lockout set to -1 (which should disable that feature).

According to the customer, when the passwords expire at the end of the 4 weeks, the accounts are locked and require their "administrator" to login as root and change the user's password. After that, the user can apparently login.

I'm a software developer, rather than a sys admin of any kind, so my knowledge of this stuff is really limited.

Anybody have any idea what is going on here? I looked at the password policies for one of the users that they say had the problem, but didn't notice anything out of the ordinary. My initial thought was that the account was expiring rather than the password, but it looks like they have password expiration setup correctly (not sure how to setup account expiration).

Any and all help/ideas and/or wild thoughts are appreciated.