In message <Pine.NEB.4.05.9811222015360.26398-100000@duhnet.net>, Todd Vierling
 writes:
>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).

Anything that wanted to do authentication could use the libc hooks; for
instance, on BSD/OS, you can set up radiusd to use any of the authentication
methods, ftpd to use other ones, and so on...

-s