LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Dan Shearer <dan@tellurian.com.au>
  To  : Mark Newton <newton@atdot.dotat.org>
  Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 15:26:55 +0930 (CST)

Re: bsd for linux users?

On Mon, 30 Apr 2001, Mark Newton wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 30, 2001 at 03:42:04PM +0930, Matthew Geddes wrote:
> 
>  > I haven't seen a great
>  > deal of mention of PAM on FreeBSD around the place either (there doesn't
>  > seem to be much in the way of active development from what I have seen).
>  > I could be (and would like to be :-)) wrong.
> 
> I'm not sure that there's *supposed* to be much in the way of active
> development:  Part of the point of PAM is that its specification settled
> down years ago.

Portability across the PAM-aware OSs (Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, HP-UX as
far as I know, perhaps more by now) is now pretty much complete for
modules which strictly comply with DCE RFC 86.0.

The Linux libpam source code is also portable, and compiles on Solaris (I
haven't tried it on anything else.) If you have a fancy PAM module that
uses some of the extra PAM-Linux library calls then you need to get the
PAM-Linux distribution. All PAM modules then work on Solaris including the
many available for Linux.

This sounds pretty silly, but maybe history explains it. Solaris was the
first implementation, then Linux which popularised the whole idea to the
point that other manufacturers got interested, and Sun got re-interested.
Somewhere in there the DCE RFC was written and I think that is why there
is a functionality gap between the RFC and Linux.

If FreeBSD implements the DCE RFC and no more then that might be the
problem. Depending on your view of standards it may not be a problem at
all, you might consider the module to be wrong-headed from the
start. But Matthew's problem can probably be solved by compiling libpam 
on FreeBSD and then compiling the module against that.

--
Dan Shearer
Open Source Manager
Mob: +61 411 49 1800
Tel: +61 8 8130 3104
dan@tellurian.com.au

-- 
LinuxSA WWW: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/  IRC: #linuxsa on irc.linux.org.au
To unsubscribe from the LinuxSA list:
  mail linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au with "unsubscribe" as the subject