Re: PAM advantages?

[Ethan Benson <erbenson@alaska.net>]

On 16/9/99 Michel Dänzer wrote:

> What's so good about PAM at all?

PAM gives the administrator extreme flexibility in how users are 
authenticated to the system, he can decide how much or how little is 
done, as well as replace certain authentication methods with 
something completely different all without any modification of the 
authentication programs (login, ftp, su et al)

for example I decided I wanted to have the BSD style wheel group 
enforced on su, I only had to add one line to /etc/pam.d/su and 
immediately su would refuse root service to anyone no in the wheel 
group.

there are plenty of much more interesting examples such as adding 
smartcard readers or some other device and integrating it with PAM by 
simply adding a single module and a modifying the configuration file 
for whatever services you want it used.



Best Regards,
Ethan Benson
To obtain my PGP key: http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/pgp/