Christos Zoulas announced recently that as of 2005-02-27, NetBSD has PAM enabled for all applications that perform authentication. Support
for PAM, which is specified in the X/Open Single Sign-On standard, was originally imported into NetBSD-current on December 12th, 2004. This means that NetBSD 3.0 will ship PAM-enabled per default; users following -current should take care to update their systems using etcupdate
and/or the ‘/etc/postinstall’ script. See Christos’
email to the current-users mailinglist and the OpenPAM website for more details.
NetBSD enabled PAM
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Is OpenPAM a solution for Pat’s Slackware?
Because he think that Linux PAM sucks and is a security risk…
”
Because he think that Linux PAM sucks and is a security risk… ”
if he thinks that he is deeply mistaken and openpam would be just as risky since they use the same interfaces
why are we talking about 3.0 is it already planned? when is it expected? Or did they just change the way they’ll number future releases?
…because it is complex. The admin has to know more, and there is more that could go wrong.
In other news, it’s almost possible to have a PAM-less Gentoo. A patched gdm is all I needed.
No. its not a risk just because it enables you to do sophisticated things
There is patched gdm ebuild for PAM-less Gentoo. I posted it. Look in gentoo forums in Gentoo Chat.
In a recent interview http://www.onlamp.com/lpt/a/5638 Christos Zoulas said:
“We are going to try to have at least one release per year from now on. This is because we don’t want the step between releases to become too large, and because it makes release engineering simpler. For example, our current target is to release 3.0 by mid-year.”
The “alternative” to PAM is basically to have a minimal password authorisation system and tell people “If you need to do user authentication you’ll have to hand-roll it, and it still probably won’t work properly, caveat emptor”.
Needless to say this isn’t very practical once you get beyond a few dozen machines and users.