Thank you, this solved it all!

Now I'm having a problem using it though. It seems that the way that I've implemented, to authenticate with a user pass combo, has a problem. On a failed login, rather than just return control to the user to type a new password, it seems to run the same password (I know this from watching in debug mode) three times, then quit saying that it failed at the line in my perl code where I have it logging in.

Furthermore, I know it is quite common to fail on three login attempts from a regular user, but its also failing after three on the root user. I thought that root usually had unlimited logins... am I wrong here?

Thanks for the help guys, both comments were very helpful!