Hi,

On 3 Oct 2001, at 8:30, sudog wrote:
> And
> if I have to pare it down to the point where the only thing it's doing
> is accessing the flatfile /etc/passwd directly (which was still
> significantly slower than direct) then what's the point of that
> particular implementation of PAM to begin with?

that is how linux gets more and more like windows. These things 
are included if needed or not. One good reason for pam is, that 
AFAIK this is the only way to get more than 8 character passwords 
under linux.

mike