Service manual

Appendix J Linux-PAM 184
Cyclades-TS Installation & Service Manual
various authentication tasks for the application. Textual information, required from/or offered to the user, can be
exchanged through the use of the application-supplied conversation function.
The Linux-PAM Configuration File
Linux-PAM is designed to provide the system administrator with a great deal of flexibility in configuring the
privilege granting applications of their system. The local configuration of those aspects of system security controlled
by Linux-PAM is contained in one of two places: either the single system file, /etc/pam.conf; or the /etc/pam.d/
directory. In this section we discuss the correct syntax of and generic options respected by entries to these files.
Configuration file syntax
The reader should note that the Linux-PAM specific tokens in this file are case insensitive. The module paths,
however, are case sensitive since they indicate a file’s name and reflect the case dependence of typical Linux
file-systems. The case-sensitivity of the arguments to any given module is defined for each module in turn.
In addition to the lines described below, there are two special characters provided for the convenience of the
system administrator: comments are preceded by a ‘#’ and extend to the next end-of-line; also, module specification
lines may be extended with a `\’ escaped new-line.
A general configuration line of the /etc/pam.conf file has the following form:
Service-name module-type control-flag module-path arguments
Below, we explain the meaning of each of these tokens. The second (and more recently adopted) way of
configuring Linux-PAM is via the contents of the /etc/pam.d/ directory. Once we have explained the meaning of
the above tokens, we will describe this method.