"Other" Reason with Details text "Not required" in PAM View Password Requests Report

Products

• CA Privileged Access Manager (PAM)

Issue/Introduction

After configuring custom password view reasons using the setPasswordViewReasons CLI command, the View Password Requests report still displays entries with Reason="Other", even though "Other" is not in the customized list of password view reasons.

Cause

One way this behavior occurs is when a policy is configured to access a target device using the internal Mindterm SSH client, and the target account configured for auto-logon does not contain valid credentials. If the initial credentials fail, the target server likely will ask for the password multiple times until retries are exhausted.
For these retry requests PAM does not prompt the user for a reason again, but the Mindterm client does fetch the password from the PAM server on each retry w/o specifying reason and details. PAM logs such internal requests with the hardcoded reason "Other" and Details text "Not required".

Another cause is when a target account is used for auto-logon that does not require the user to provide a reason.

Resolution

This is working as designed. These events represent internal password view requests that are issued without user-selected reasons.

Events associated with retries always will follow an event showing the same user, same target account and same code, but with the actual reason and details provided by the PAM user.

Events associated with auto-logon actions where no reason was required can be identified by a missing code, since PAM does not set a default for the "Code" column.

Additional Information

The following screenshot shows examples of both types of events with reason "Other" and Details text "Not required":

 

As of May 2026 the additional password view requests from the Mindterm SSH client on failed authentication attempts are under review to see if they can be eliminated in future PAM releases.