pwauth (8)

pwauth

Pwauth is an authenticator designed to be used with mod_auth_external or mod_authnz_external and the Apache HTTP Daemon to support reasonably secure web authentication out of the system password database on most versions of Unix. Particulary - secure authentication against PAM.

The simplest test pwauth is to start a root shell and just run pwauth. It will attempt to read the login and password from standard input, so type a login name, hit return, then type a password, and hit return (the password will echo on your screen). The check the status code that was returned (in csh: "echo $status" in sh: "echo $?").

If the login/password were correct you should get a zero status code. If not, you will get some other value. See below the list of status codes to find the meaning of the various values returned. Any values 50 or greater indicate a configuration error.

0 STATUS_OK

Login OK.

1 STATUS_UNKNOWN

Nonexistant login or (for some configurations) incorrect password.

2 STATUS_INVALID

Incorrect password (for some configurations).

3 STATUS_BLOCKED

Uid number is below MIN_UNIX_UID value configured in config.h.

4 STATUS_EXPIRED

Login ID has expired.

5 STATUS_PW_EXPIRED

Login's password has expired.

6 SSTATUS_NOLOGIN

Logins to system have been turned off (usually by /etc/nologin file).

7 STATUS_MANYFAILES

Limit on number of bad logins exceeded.

50 STATUS_INT_USER

pwauth was invoked by a uid not on the SERVER_UIDS list. If you get this error code, you probably have SERVER_UIDS set incorrectly in pwauth's config.h file.

51 STATUS_INT_ARGS

pwauth was not given a login & password to check. The means the passing of data from mod_auth_external to pwauth is messed up. Most likely one is trying to pass data via environment variables, while the other is trying to pass data via a pipe.

52 STATUS_INT_ERR

one of several rare and unlikely internal errors occurred. You'll have to read the source code to figure these out.

53 STATUS_INT_NOROOT

pwauth was not able to read the password database. Usually this means it is not running as root. (PAM and login.conf configurations will return 1 in this case.)

pwauth was written by Jan Wolter <[email protected]>.

This manual page was written by Hai Zaar <[email protected]>, for the Debian project (but may be used by others).