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>>>>> "Ethan" == Ethan Benson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

Ethan> passwd not being able to update /etc/shadow would be a very bad
Ethan> thing since users would be unable to change thier own passwords.
Ethan> users need to be encouraged to change thier passwords, not
Ethan> discouraged.

Off topic, but I'm just wondering if there has ever been any though to
putting each user's information in a separate file.  So if I had users
"foo" and "bar", then I would have files /etc/passwd.d/foo and
/etc/passwd.d/bar (or something like that), with /etc/passwd.d/foo only
read/writable by user foo (and root), and /etc/passwd.d/bar only
read/writable by user bar (and root).

This way, the login programs would still need to be SUID root (but I
don't think there's any way around that, since they need to launch a
shell under different UID's), but programs such as passwd would not,
since user foo (and root) already have permissions to his password file.

The only problems I could think of is that it would eat up a chunk of
inodes (but I don't know of anyone who's running short on inodes), and
we'd have a lot of internal fragmentation in the filesystem (which
shouldn't be too much of a problem, with disk space so cheap).  If all
the login programs use PAM, then creating such a scheme won't break any
programs (hopefully).

Ethan> i don't think you can really modify passwd to be that granular
Ethan> about ssh vs other methods of access.

OK, back on topic... could you modify PAM?  Do all login programs in
Debian use PAM now?

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