[Info-Ingres] Ingres PAM Integration

[Teresa]

The Ingres community (Ronald Jeniga of independIT Integrative
Technologies GmbH) has contributed source code changes to make Ingres
running on various flavors of UNIX/LINUX platforms Pluggable
Authentication Modules (PAM) aware. Ingres Engineering is interested
in the feedback from the Ingres community as to how they see this
feature supported with Ingres.

In the current Ingres security architecture, user authentication in
Ingres is implemented in a separate SETUID program called ingvalidpw
which directly invokes OS provided APIs for reading info from the /etc/
passwd file on the standard UNIX systems or from /etc/shadow file on
the UNIX systems that provide shadow passwords for additional
security. The source code changes from the community to support PAM in
Ingres were implemented in ingvalidpw.c and mkvalidpw (utility builds
ingvalidpw executable).

A detailed write-up of our plans to incorporate this source code into
Ingres is available at http://community.ingres.com/wiki/Ingres_PAM_Integration.
A discussion page for feedback is available from within the
aforementioned document to capture results of the discussion.
Discussion can take place on both the forum or  comp.databases.ingres
as well as the discussion page and I'll try to ensure it is all
captured on the feedback page.

Any and all feedback is most appreciated as we do plan on moving more
of our planned development features to the Community wiki for review/
feedback.

Regards,
Teresa