>I had to pare down the PAM modules involved in a login to just the unix 
>auth--but at that point what was the point of having PAM in the way at all? 
>It was still dog slow but at least I was able to login again. Mind you this 
>was an older PAM running on Red Hat, so hopefully things have changed. I 
>doubt it, but maybe.

Ah, okay, that makes sense.  I've never figured it out, but PAM on Red Hat
has bitten me as well; it does some _very_ strange stuff on the backend
(e.g, the whole mess with PAM authenticating things like the X server
made no sense to me).

>The point is that that implementation sucked ass and I'm hoping we aren't 
>being led down that same garden path.

Understandable.  I'm more interested in having the API available than
following the whole Red Hat model.

--Ken