Plugable Authentication Modules, or PAM, is the standard mechanism that most Unix and Linux Operatng Systems use for user credential authentication. By design, PAM is broken out into a number of files, each with a specific purpose. Before you can get started with PAM you need to understand a bit about how PAM configuration files are formatted. So lets get into that first before we try to bite off anything more.
unix
Finding Files with Special Permissions in Linux
Ok, before you even attempt to read this post, I am assuming that you not only understand standard UNIX file permissions, but that you also understand special file permissions. What are special file permissions you ask. Well you know them as setuid, setgid, and the stickbit. If you don't know what these things are then I will give you a very brief introduction.
How to Manage Password Aging in Solaris, AIX, and Linux
LogoIts possible that sometime in your short, meaningless life, you may need to create an account that has a password that is set to never expire. This is somethimes the case with headless accounts and specialty accounts such as the type you might have to setup for monitoring or security scanning. You might also find yourself setting up shared headless accounts that have locked passwords in order to block direct logins. This second scenario can be especially troublesome when this is some sort of application or database user with cron jobs, as even an account without a password and expire and lock. If this occurs all of a users cron jobs will fail. All because the account expired.
RHEL6 – Using ACLs to Grant and Restrict FIle Access.
Access Control Lists or ACLs provide more controll over file permissions than standard linux file permissions (UGO -- user, group, other). For example lets say that you want all members of the group "students" to have the ability to read a file, however you want to allow one user in that group the ability to … Continue reading RHEL6 – Using ACLs to Grant and Restrict FIle Access.