Cannot re-enable password requirement for login to my account after disabling it. (14.04)

Question

Yesterday I temporarily took the password requirement off my login account (the only account on the machine). I then later tried to re-enable it. The password took (it works when I use sudo for instance), but it is not required to log in, even though I have checked that option in user settings. How do I make the password required again for login access?

I should also note that the lock screen isn't working, it appears to immediately lock then unlock.

I have tried setting it to no password, then setting a password again.

I recently upgraded to 14.04 from Precise.

Answer 1

I finally solved this myself. Even though I had set "Automatic Login" to off and had set a user password in System Settings -> User Accounts, it had failed to properly set the flags in /etc/gshadow and /etc/group. To check and see if it is set properly, do in terminal:

sudo grep nopasswd /etc/gshadow

which should return something like:

nopasswdlogin:!::

and

sudo grep nopasswd /etc/group

returning:

nopasswdlogin:x:112:

Instead, mine looked like:

nopasswdlogin:!::josh
nopasswdlogin:x:112:josh

if you see user names at the end of these lines, then you need to remove them. Any user names on these lines indicate that user can login in without a password. To remove them, just open the files in gedit and delete ONLY the user names you want to require passwords of. You can open them with:

gksudo gedit /etc/gshadow
gksudo gedit /etc/group

Once you delete the user names, save the files and reboot. Done!