PAM Errata and RH 5.0

Tom Browder (tbrowde@asi-fwb.com)
Tue, 6 Jan 1998 07:01:07 -0600 (CST)

Thanks to Andy Isaacson, I was able to get my new RH 5.0
system going again (with the r-commands). I guess no
one else has had problems--perhaps none are using Linux
Alpha in a commercial environment. I have heard persons
suggesting using ssh to alleviate these types of problems,
but, for commercial use, the licensing fees are exhorbitant
for a small business; thus I have no use for it.

In order to fix the problem, Andy has a patch for PAM 0.59,
which he has provided to RedHat--I hope they put it in
the errata section as an RPM soon--it needs to be there.
I also hope they have forwarded all their patches to PAM to
its author/maintainer (starting with holdovers from 0.56 which
need to be incorporated by the maintainer of PAM).

By the way, in order to patch PAM, I also had to build and install
the "crack" library (whoses source were on my RH 5.0 Alpha
CD).

Since I have had problems with PAM on both my installations
of RH Linux for Alpha, I believe it would be nice for RedHat
to allow some way to negate PAM's overarching hold on a system--not
fun when things go wrong in a poorly documented security system
(note all the holes in the PAM documentation). Allowing a system
with a version number of 0.5x to be in complete control is a little
pushy, I think--how much testing has been done on multiple
architectures?

Enough complaints--otherwise, the RH 5.0 distribution is a great
improvement over RH 4.2.

Thanks again, Andy Isaacson.

Tom Browder
ASI Systems International
(A Division of SRS Technologies)