Ever since the invention in 2004 by Nalin Dahyabhai and its
roll-out in 2005 by Thorsten Kukuk countless eyes were drawn from the
rest of the Unix world, in how Linux did its PAM in practice. They seem
to have been happily surprised with PAM on Linux. A well known SCO
Consultant wrote a special web-page with a introductory course in PAM :
http://aplawrence.com/Basics/understandingpam.html
Other - more in depth - analysts decided to start authoring books like :
Mechanics of User Identification and Authentication:
Fundamentals of Identity Management
by Dobromir Todorov
Hardcover: 760 pages
Publisher: Auerbach Publications; 1 edition (June 18, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1420052195
ISBN-13: 978-1420052190
http://www.amazon.com/Mechanics-User-Identification-Authentication-Fundamentals/dp/1420052195/
which did not forget to mention and give a full treatise on PAM allways
featuring of course the pam_stack.so version. In addition several third
party applications were rolled out on Linux, sometimes binary only, but
all relied for their authentication on PAM with pam_stack.so inside its
authentication configuration.
With this patch at least a lot of documentation starts to make sense
again, which can be of great relief when trying to lock your
back- or frontdoor in a hurry.