HP CIFS Client A.02.02.03 Administrator's Guide

8 PAM NTLM
This chapter provides a description of PAM NTLM.
Introduction
PAM NTLM ( NT Lan Manager) is a Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) that enables HP-UX
users to be authenticated against Windows servers during system login.
PAM is an authentication framework in UNIX, used to authenticate users logging into a UNIX
system. PAM loads a dynamically loadable module (shared library) that performs the actual
authentication. PAM can also be configured to use multiple shared library modules.
PAM NTLM uses CIFS servers to authenticate users logging into an HP-UX system. In other words,
PAM NTLM uses the NT LanManager protocol to authenticate the UNIX users. It sends the UNIX
user's name and password to the CIFS server for validation and returns the result to the PAM
framework. The HP CIFS client uses the PAM NTLM authentication information to access the shares
on the CIFS server. Thus, users logging into an HP-UX system can access CIFS-mounted file systems
without having to use the cifslogin command.
NOTE: PAM NTLM does not support NTLMv2 password encryption.
Configuring PAM NTLM requires you to understand the PAM framework in general. Refer to pam(3),
pam.conf(4), and Managing Systems and Workgroups at http://docs.hp.com/hpux/os for more
information about PAM.
Figure 2 PAM Introduction
PAM NTLM
This section provides a list of PAM NTLM features and a description of the User Map File.
Introduction 65