Long time no post!! Well, the last two meetings that happened with HLUG concerned Robert Carlile's XML adventures, then Robert Spotswood's description of the GIMP (both the newest release changes and that image manipulation program in general). This last meeting (Saturday March 8th, was it?) featured myself with a lightly-prepared investigation of the LDAP - PAM relationship, plus a question/answer session widely reported to have been better than the presentation, particularly since the old reliable question came up from someone "What's your favorite OS?". My attempt not to answer forced me to expand on that attitude with an attempt to list every single OS I currently run at home. I gave up at 10 (it's actually 12, I later determined). My rationale for this situation was that all OS's do something well for some constituency, explaining their continuance in a competitive marketplace, plus it's good for an admin to be prepared for whatever they break and then ask you to fix. Carlile thinks I'm insane and that I should concentrate on fewer systems. Debate continues.
The LDAP-PAM subject is basically a can of worms. If you wish to use Pluggable Authentication Modules in a context of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, not only do you need general knowledge of the history and nature of these matters, but you need documentation regarding exactly how these matters are implemented. For example, I found good instructions as to how to set things up for Red Hat in the McGraw-Hill test study manual for the RHCE certification. If you want to use LDAP in your distro (Linux Distribution) and it's not in there, the easiest solution would be to get an updated or otherwise different distro that has it/uses it. In broad terms, PAM is a modular way to set up the login/password routine for a Nix OS (other than what's provided at default), and LDAP is one approach to setting up a network-enabled password database. Specifically (according to the Sun website), the precursor DAP was set up in Solaris 2.6 in the mid-1990's and then, as TCP/IP began to show up everywhere, the "lightweight" version appeared, which presumed the presence of TCP/IP, thus not having to bring such specific code into the situation.
The best resources about LDAP and your favorite login arrangement would probably be the stuff at http://www.openldap.org and then the .org that maintains your distro.
