Salix Forums

Hi,

Is there any way to configure roaming profiles and centralized authentication with SalixOS ? I'm using GNU/Linux professionally (in schools, town halls, public libraries and SOHO environments), and currently, I'm using CentOS on both servers and desktops (with NFS/NIS and quota) for the job. SalixOS seems very clean, only I can't figure out this showstopper.

Any suggestions ?

The short answer is that it can be done but it isn't straightforward. Slackware does not implement PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules, see: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/pam/ ), and PAM is what allows for different authentication methods in Linux. It's not impossible, of course, but you might be better off using Zenwalk or Agilia Linux, Slackware derivatives which have already implemented PAM for you.

You mentioned NIS which is truly ancient Sun technology which traditionally used a password file that was pretty much universally readable. The securenets feature in recent versions of ypserv solved that problem but, in general, a more modern and more elegant solution is an LDAP server used for authentication.

If you are keen on implementing PAM in SalixOS then the Agilia (formerly MOPS Linux) SlackBuild is probably the place to start. See: http://packages.agilialinux.ru/package_ ... 686-1.txz/ or perhaps http://mirror.yandex.ru/mopslinux/sourc ... ource/pam/