Checking if PAM is used by login

[Tobias Schaefer]

Hi,

> I don't follow you. PAM is not a service but a library (with plugins in
> the form of shared objects - .so files). You don't simply disable PAM.
> Take the /bin/login program - it is used for login at the console. Try to
> run ldd /bin/login and see that this program is linked with libpam.so.
> Then check /etc/pam.d/login to see how login is using PAM.

on the other hand sshd could stop PAM authentication due to a 
configuration change. The library would still be linked in, but its code 
would no longer be executed. (The same could happen with apache and other 
programs.)

You could configure a logging module into the PAM stack. Some 10 years ago 
I wrote such a module to debug PAM problems. The module is still available 
via http://www.rz.uni-hohenheim.de/~schaefer/linux/pam/index.html. But it 
probably won't compile out of the box since it was only tested with Linux 
distributions that have long since passed away.


Tobias
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