Update
Some time has passed since I wrote this article but I am pleased to say
that even more has happened that is relevant to Linux readers.
Some highlights from the intervening period include:
- Solaris 2.6 is now shipping and PAM is
fully included.
- The X/Open group absorbed PAM into their ``Single Sign
On'' initiative.
- Apache can be configured to use PAM for
authentication.
- The Common Desktop Environment has PAM support built
in.
- Red Hat now defaults to using pam_pwdb.so instead of the
pam_unix_*.so modules.
- Caldera's OpenLinux has adopted
Linux-PAM as its authentication scheme.
- Luigi Catuogno (Italy) has
written a pam_tcfs.so module (which was hoped for in this
article) as pam_cfs.so.
- If you can find a reason, courtesy of
David Airlie, you can even authenticate your Linux box with an NT
server using the pam_smb.so module.
More modules are quietly being developed all the time. Work is still
needed to complete PAM support in many applications (hence the focus
of this article), but all in all, implementing PAM has turned out to be a
good and useful project.