Re: [gtk-list] PAM?

[Eivind Kvedalen <eivindkv ifi uio no>]

> OK, I've seen this word floating about, and I doubt you use it as a butter
> substitute while cooking SPAM.  What exactly is PAM?

hehe... PAM is short for Pluggable Authentication Module, and it's a
method for authenticating users for many different kinds of resources;
ftp, telnet, login etc. The good thing about this is that the application
itself does not do the authentication, but uses the PAM library to do the
work. PAM itself checks appropriate configuration files, and loads
modules to take care of specific authentication. In this way, PAM aware
programs will work without recompiling even if you change the underlying
layer, which actually does the job of verifying the user. For instance,
changing to MD4 hash (WinNT style of password-crypting) in the /etc/passwd
file is no problem when using PAM (actually done this at work for some
weird reason :) ).

More info can be found at http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/pam/

btw, PAM has been used in the latest distributions from RedHat, 4.0 and up 
afaik.

Eivind

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