authentication service for unix

[Mathias Waack]

Diez B. Roggisch wrote:

>> Using PAM is definitively not the reason why your process must be
>> run as root. What exactly are you doing?
> 
> Well, I started fiddling around with pam, and found that when
> running it as user the only one I could authenticate was the user
> the process ran with.

Ok, my fault - you're right. If you are going to authenticate a local
user you usually need read access to /etc/shadow. 

The easiest way to work around is using an existing tool like login
or su. They do the PAM stuff for you.  

Mathias