Comment 6 for bug 1160288

Thanks, I've been able to reproduce the problem now, though it's rather tricky - it requires both the libpam-sss package and the mkhomedir profile that you have available locally, in order to reproduce this. (It seems that the sss profiles you have on your system come from precise-updates and don't look the same in the precise version of the package; however, this apparently has no bearing on the problem.)

Essentially, this is a problem with the handling of trailing whitespace in the pam config (/usr/share/pam-configs/mkhomedir has a whitespace-only line at the end of the file). pam-auth-update should be fixed to ignore such blank lines, and not store them to /var/lib/pam/foo, which is where the problem arises.