Re: Radius, BSD, Linux, etc

Mark Whittington (markc@einteractive.com)
Wed, 9 Apr 1997 08:19:25 -0400 (EDT)

> Shadow passwords aren't a function of the kernel in linux. They are a
> user mode function. In the more recent linux distributions, shadow

To be more precise, the behavior of the password management functions are
defined in libraries or (in the case of PAM) modules.

> Biggest problems you may face when using system passwords may be the fact
> that BSD, I believe uses a different crypt setup that is essentially
> incompatible with the crypt in Linux. So encrypted passwords cannot

This is partially true. FreeBSD ships with a crypt(3) that generates MD5
hashes. There is an optional package that you can install that gives you
DES encryption which is the same as what Linux uses by default, in which
case integration is fairly straightforward. If I were setting something
like this up, my biggest concern would be making sure that the users
didn't have the ability to login to the backup server, assuming they had
valid shell login capability on the primary server. If so, it could be
easily handled in a perl script.

-Mark Whittington

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Tomorrow will be canceled due to lack of interest.