Authen::PAM

Version 0.16

2005-Sep-20

        Copyright (c) 1998-2005 Nikolay Pelov. All rights reserved.
        This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
        modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

DESCRIPTION

This module provides a Perl interface to the PAM library.

Home site: <http://nik.pelov.name/Authen-PAM/>

After installing the module you can read a small faq with examples by typing 'perldoc Authen::PAM::FAQ'.

PREREQUISITES

Before you can build Authen::PAM you need to have the following things installed on your system:

• Perl, at least version 5.003_23
• This module is known to work with the following or newer implementations of the PAM library:
  • Linux-PAM <http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/pam/>
  • Solaris 2.6
  • FreeBSD 3.1
  • OpenPAM <http://openpam.sourceforge.net/>
  • HP-UX 11.0
  • Darwin 6.0 and Mac OS X 10.2

BUILDING AND INSTALLING THE MODULE

Assuming you have met all the prerequisites, you can built the module using the standard sequence of commands:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

By default the module is build using the compiler and options used to build the perl executable itself. If you want to change the C compiler then set the CC environment variable, for example like this:

CC=gcc perl Makefile.PL

However, besides changing the compiler, it is still not possible to change any other options (for example CFLAGS). If you want to do this then you should edit by hand the generated Makefile.

If you have any problems in building and installing the module then you should first check on the home page of the Authen::PAM module for the latest development version (if any) which could possibly fix your problems. If none is available or the problems remain then you can write me a mail which includes the following information:

• the version of your unix - `uname -a'
• the configuration of the perl - `perl -V'
• if you are on linux:
  • the name and version of the distribution you are using
  • the version of the pam - `ls /lib/libpam.so' or `ls /usr/lib/libpam.so'
• the description of the "login" service from your pam configuration - usually found in `/etc/pam.conf' file or in the file `/etc/pam.d/login'
• the output of the `perl Makefile.PL', `make' and `make test'
• any relevant messages produced by the syslogd daemon - usually found in `/var/log/messages'
• if the problem is in a perl script which uses the Authen::PAM module then the source of this script (even if it is a slight modification of some of the source code provided with this module)

KNOWN PROBLEMS

Missing PAM header files

I know that this is trivial, but some people actually report this. If you get an error like

PAM.xs:11: security/pam_appl.h: No such file or directory

this means that either you don't have the PAM library installed on your system or at least the PAM header files are missing. If your distribution provides the PAM library as packages then you should check that you also have installed the pam-dev or pam-devel package.

FreeBSD 4.x

Several people have reported the following error during 'make test': not ok 10 (28 - Module is unknown)
I've tracked down the problem to the dynamic loader of FreeBSD not exporting some symbols in dlopen()'d modules. I've submitted a bug report - http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=25059 It seems that this bug has been fixed already and starting from the next release of FreeBSD (probably 4.6) the module should work again.

Solaris 2.8

Some users are reporting the following error during 'make test': Segmentation Fault - core dumped
make: *** [test_dynamic] Error 139
The problem seems to be related with the use of Kerberos authentication (pam_krb5 or pam_krb54). At this moment I don't have any explanation for it.

Login Restrictions

Most of the current configurations of the 'login' service include a module 'pam_securetty' or 'pam_access' which restrict the login of some users (especially root) depending on the tty or the host name they are logging from. The configuration files of these two modules are /etc/securetty and /etc/security/access.conf respectively. So, if you are running 'make test' and get an error '(Authentication failure)' on test 10 then this might be due to login restrictions of PAM.

Deprecated

The following problems occured on old versions of libraries and OSes and are not included in the README file anymore. If you experience them, check the README file in older versions of the PAM library (0.14 or less).

• Solaris 2.6 buggy PAM library
• Perl 5.004_03
• RedHat 6.1 (Authentication failure)
• RedHat 8.0 (Segmentation fault (core dumped))

AUTHOR

Nikolay Pelov <NIKIP at cpan dot org>

Web page: <http://nik.pelov.name/Authen-PAM/>