README


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README for pam_pwdfile PAM module - Charl P. Botha <cpbotha@ieee.org>
$Id: README,v 1.8 2001-07-14 20:50:21 cpbotha Exp $
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This is version 0.95 of pam_pwdfile.

This pam module can be used for the authentication service only, in cases
where one wants to use a different set of passwords than those in the main
system password database.  E.g. in our case we have an imap server running,
and prefer to keep the imap passwords different from the system passwords
for security reasons.

The /etc/pam.d/imap looks like this (e.g.)
#%PAM-1.0
auth       required	/lib/security/pam_pwdfile.so pwdfile /etc/imap.passwd
account    required	/lib/security/pam_pwdb.so

At the moment the only parameters that pam_pwdfile.so parses for is
"pwdfile", followed by the name of the ASCII password database, as in the
above example.  Also, thanks to Jacob Schroeder <jacob@quantec.de>,
pam_pwdfile now supports password file locking.  Adding a "flock" parameter
activates this feature: pam_pwdfile uses and honours flock() file locking on
the specified password file.  Specifying "noflock" or no flock-type
parameter at all deactivates this feature.

Example:
auth  required /lib/security/pam_pwdfile.so pwdfile /etc/blah.passwd flock

Like other PAM modules, pam_pwdfile causes a 2 second delay when an
incorrect password is supplied.  This is too discourage brute force testing;
however, this behaviour can be disabled with a "nodelay" parameter.  Thanks
to Ethan Benson for this patch.

The ASCII password file is simply a list of lines, each looking like this:
username:crypted_passwd[13] in the case of vanilla crypted passwords and
username:crypted_passwd[34] in the case of MD5 crypted passwords.  The
latter is thanks to Warwick Duncan <warwick@chemeng.uct.ac.za>.

Note that we still expect users to have accounts in the usual place, as we
make use of the pam_pwdb.so module for the account service.  This module is
just so that one can have multiple sets of passwords for different services,
e.g. with our /etc/imap.passwd.  It is however possible with certain
applications patched for pam (Cyrus IMAP server e.g.) that one does not need
the users to exist in the system database.

These files have been created for inclusion into the PAM source tree.
Thanks to Michael-John Turner <mj@debian.org> pam_pwdfile is available as a
debian package (libpam-pwdfile) from potato onwards.