10.7: Unlock screens using any admin password

Jan 24, '12 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: skinlayers

Under Lion, the screen saver authentication dialog box does not allow you to enter a username. So even if you've made the changes detailed in this Snow Leopard hint there is no way to put in alternate credentials to unlock a user's screen.

First, edit /etc/pam.d/screensaver as per the original Snow Leopard hint:

Then, still in Terminal, we make a wholly unintuitive change to /etc/authorization:
[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one, but the original Snow Leopard hint was good. Be sure to make the file backups before doing any editing, and if it were me, I'd want to do this on a test machine (with a full system backup) before deploying it. If you try this and find any errors/omissions please post them in the comments, and I'll correct the hint.

Note: Changed references to /etc/authentication to the correct file /etc/authorization and other cleanup.]

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120116131248157