Per-User Authentication with Linux PAM?

Alessandro Bottoni alexbottoni at yahoo.it
Tue Feb 16 09:46:26 UTC 2010


Hi All,
I'm looking for a way (a module, a technique) to perform the usual
(local) Linux-PAM authentication on a per-user basis. That is: I need to
have a different authentication stack for each user of a Linux machine.

Googling around, I found this very interesting "pam_per_user" module:

http://www-dev.cites.uiuc.edu/pam/

http://www.feep.net/PAM/pam_per_user/

Created by Mark D. Roth in 2002.

I tried to compile and install it on my Linux Mint 8.0 machine but
apparently the code is so old that the compiler is unable to compile it.
BTW: I have got this error:

alex at alex-laptop /media/Shared/Sources/pam_per_user-0.4 $ make
gcc    -o pam_per_user.so.1 pam_per_user.o strlcpy.o -lpam -ldl
/usr/lib/gcc/i486-linux-gnu/4.4.1/../../../../lib/crt1.o: In function
`_start':
/build/buildd/eglibc-2.10.1/csu/../sysdeps/i386/elf/start.S:115:
undefined reference to `main'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [pam_per_user.so.1] Errore 1

Anyway, I'm not interested in fix it at the moment (because a I do not
want a customer-supported solution, if I can avoid it).

Rather, I would like to know if any kind of per-user authentication
system has ever been planned/included in the main PAM module collection
or if anybody knows of an alternative to PAM that implements such a
protocol (OpenPAM, e.g.).

Thanks in advance for your attention.

PS: No, if you are thinking of it, the PAM_ListFile module included with
my distro cannot solve my problem. It just adds a ACLs logic to PAM, so
that you can define "who can access what". See here:

http://matthew.ath.cx/cgi-bin/man/man2html?pam_listfile+8
-- 

Alessandro Bottoni
Website: http://www.alessandrobottoni.it/

"Don't ask what Linux can do for you, ask what you can do for Linux"
     -- Greg Klebus




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