[ Thanks to Rob
Kennedy for this link. ]
“In this article I will describe how PAM works and demonstrate
it’s usefulness.”
“PAM stands for Pluggable Authentication Modules. Basically
PAM is a way to change on the fly the way applications or
services are authenticated. When you use PAM, you can define
at run time how an application or service is authenticated, rather
than having to recompile it.”
“Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) was designed to provide
a generic method of accesing a variety of password and other
authentication schemes. As the name implies, there is a set of
modules which may be “plugged in” to change the behavior of
authentication.”