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Date:	Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:03:54 +0100
From:	Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
To:	cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject:	Re: NSS and PAM
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On Nov 19 10:18, Jerome Haltom wrote:
> I was wondering what the potential for providing a NSS and PAM
> implementation which used the built in Windows account base by default
> would be.
> 
> Basically it would remove manual generation of /etc/passwd
> and /etc/group. Apps which queryed for these values would just get the
> right things made up on the fly. In my case, this means domain users.
> 
> I'd imagine you would map local users to 'username' and domain users to
> 'DOM\username' or some such, which is basically what Winbind ends up
> doing on Linux.
> 
> Authentication using PAM would simply remove a lot of issues.

And it would generate new issues.  You would never be able to use a
simple user name for a domain user because there's no mapping from a
Cygwin user name to a Windows domain user name.  There would be no place
to store a Cygwin home directory and the user's shell, except you
generate a new file for these mappings.  But then, why not just use
/etc/passwd.  Apart from other problems like having to teach ls to show
more than 8 characters of the user name, there's also the problem of
porting pam to Cygwin.  http://cygwin.com/acronyms/#SHTDI


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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