Disillusioned with PAM

[Clifton Royston]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 12:00:46PM -0800, freebsd-hackers-request at freebsd.org wrote:
> Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 17:31:36 +1030
> From: "Daniel O'Connor" <doconnor at gsoft.com.au>
> Subject: Re: Disillusioned with PAM
> On Thursday 11 December 2003 20:35, staf wagemakers wrote:
> > >   /usr/bin/passwd will be a real pain to use for a Web GUI as it
> > > requires a pty, which means extensive "coding around it" to fake one up
> > > for it a la poppassd.  I thought PAM was going to solve this for me,
> > > because of the "password management" function designed in... only it
> > > appears so far that no PAM method which implements local password
> > > changing actually exists on FreeBSD.  What a mess.
> >
> > CGIpaf supports FreeBSD without pam basically it runs "pwd_mkdb" to
> > update the password. If you need c functions to update a password the
> > source might be useful to you.  http://staf.patat.org/cgipaf/
> 
> The 'pw' command can change passwords (among many other things) and it does 
> not need a pty, eg..
> echo newpassword | pw usermod foobar -h 0 

  Thanks for taking the time for the note.  One of my co-workers
suggested pw to me the previous evening, and I discovered the -h option
in the man page.  I had my CGI working to do password changes before
the end of the evening, so I can confirm that this solution works fine!
 
> In a CGI you would open a pipe to pw and feed it the password.
 
  It's just a hair trickier, because you presumably don't want your CGI
to run as root, nor to have pw be suid - but a tiny suid wrapper in
Perl with thorough parameter and taint checking took care of that. 
Just recording the solution for the archives.

  -- Clifton

-- 
          Clifton Royston  --  cliftonr at tikitechnologies.com 
         Tiki Technologies Lead Programmer/Software Architect
Did you ever fly a kite in bed?  Did you ever walk with ten cats on your head?
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If you never did, you should.  These things are fun, and fun is good.
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