On Sun, 22 Nov 1998 seebs@plethora.net wrote:

: >to rolling this particular way of doing it into NetBSD, I'd like to see
: >it contrasted to PAM, about which I know just about nothing except the
: >very general conceptual level.
: 
: What is PAM?

Pluggable Authentication Modules.  Provides for a dlopen()ed set of
libraries that can allow authentication for user ID's via any mechanism
(/etc/passwd, YP, Kerberos, RSA, SQL, ...).  The difference, from what I can
see of this minor discussion, is that PAM allows authentication for anything
from Web servers to interactive logins to POP3 servers.  Its use is not
restricted to login(1).

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)