Service manual

Appendix J Linux-PAM 192
Cyclades-TS Installation & Service Manual
be used to attack a user’s account. In some circumstances, however, this sort of information is not deemed
a threat: displaying a user’s full name when asking them for a password in a secured environment could
also be called being ‘friendly’. The expose_account argument is a standard module argument to encourage
a module to be less discrete about account information as it is deemed appropriate by the local administrator.
Any line in (one of) the configuration file(s), that is not formatted correctly, will generally tend (erring on the side of
caution) to make the authentication process fail. A corresponding error is written to the system log files with a call
to syslog(3).
Directory based configuration
More flexible than the single configuration file, it is possible to configure libpam via the contents of the /etc/
pam.d/ directory. In this case the directory is filled with files each of which has a filename equal to a service-name
(in lower-case): it is the personal configuration file for the named service.
The Cyclades-TS Linux-PAM was compiled to uses both /etc/pam.d/ and /etc/pam.conf in sequence. In this
mode, entries in /etc/pam.d/ override those of /etc/pam.conf.
The syntax of each file in /etc/pam.d/ is similar to that of the /etc/pam.conf file and is made up of lines of the
following form:
module-type control-flag module-path arguments
The only difference being that the service-name is not present. The service-name is of course the name of the
given configuration file. For example, /etc/pam.d/login contains the configuration for the login service.