Menu-drive changes to PAM with authconfig.
Authconfig may not be in all distributions. I found it today in RedHat Enterprise Linux 4.0 Application Server (rhel4as) and it was helpful enough that I want to share it here.
I know a bit about how PAM based authentication works but when I looked at /etc/pam.d I found it’s way different in RHEL 4 AS than it is in Ubuntu and openSUSE. In /etc/pam.d/{something} I found a note saying not to edit the file because authconfig would overwrite any changes I made. The authconfig man page is hoary, but here’s what you need to know:
- authconfig is a curses menu program that offers checkboxes and forms to guide you through setting up various authentication methods.
- Use “authconfig –test” to play arround – it will pretend to be doing at real reconfiguration but won’t change anything. You can use it to see what you’ll need to know to configure, say, LDAP-base auth.
- Plain authconfig will bring up the menu in live mode.
- There are command-line switched to do everything you can in the menu – use those for scripted changes.
That’s it. Enjoy.