pam_tally: error opening /var/log/faillog about swaylock HOT 5 CLOSED

Do you get the same error when you login on a normal tty?

from swaylock.

I don't.

from swaylock.

The problem appears to stem from the PAM config Sway ships. For pam.linux it has:

auth include login

But at least on Arch this needs to be:

auth include system-auth

The default provided by Swaylock probably works on Debian systems, but not everywhere. This appears to be similar to the i3lock bug in Arch: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/31544. The swaylock bug is here: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/53358. Depending on your distro, you might need to file a bug with them too. This is also being patched in the Gentoo ebuild for i3lock: https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/x11-misc/i3lock/i3lock-2.12.ebuild#n35 but similarly to Arch seems to be missing from the swaylock ebuild: https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/gui-apps/swaylock/swaylock-1.4.ebuild

from swaylock.

Also, if you're running Arch, do check you don't have any .pacnew's in /etc/pam.d. system-login moved to using tally2, which should be enough to fix the issue instead of requiring the PAM config change.

from swaylock.

The move to tally2 indeed suppressed the errors.

from swaylock.