The authentication mechanism of this module is based on the contents of two files; /etc/hosts.equiv (or and ~/.rhosts. Firstly, hosts listed in the former file are treated as equivalent to the localhost. Secondly, entries in the user's own copy of the latter file is used to map "remote-host remote-user" pairs to that user's account on the current host. Access is granted to the user if their host is present in /etc/hosts.equiv and their remote account is identical to their local one, or if their remote account has an entry in their personal configuration file.

The module authenticates a remote user (internally specified by the item PAM_RUSER connecting from the remote host (internally specified by the item PAM_RHOST). Accordingly, for applications to be compatible this authentication module they must set these items prior to calling pam_authenticate(). The module is not capable of independently probing the network connection for such information.

OPTIONS

debug

Print debug information.

silent

Don't print informative messages.

superuser=account

Handle account as root.

MODULE TYPES PROVIDED

Only the auth module type is provided.

RETURN VALUES

PAM_AUTH_ERR

The remote host, remote user name or the local user name couldn't be determined or access was denied by .rhosts file.

PAM_USER_UNKNOWN

User is not known to system.

EXAMPLES

To grant a remote user access by /etc/hosts.equiv or .rhosts for rsh add the following lines to /etc/pam.d/rsh:

#%PAM-1.0
#
auth     required       pam_rhosts.so
auth     required       pam_nologin.so
auth     required       pam_env.so
auth     required       pam_unix.so
      

SEE ALSO

rootok(3), hosts.equiv(5), rhosts(5), pam.conf(5), pam.d(5), pam(7)

AUTHOR

pam_rhosts was written by Thorsten Kukuk <kukuk@thkukuk.de>