More Nerd Stuff
I’m a bit disappointed that my Slackware days (my “salad days”?) didn’t force me to learn PAM for authentication (Pat dislikes PAM … it’s a long-standing thing). PAM rocks, especially for servers. If I was worrying about virtual hosting (see Webmin below), I would currently be figuring out how to get every server to use PAM authentication. It’s worth a look. You can authenticate against anything through a module, and it doesn’t even seem to be too hard to write a module by hand.
I have been using PAM-MySQL, but there’s a PAM-LDAP and just about anything else. There are even PAM modules that act as passthroughs as far as authentication go, but they are able to mount drive volumes upon login. These are very cool. You put them into the auth chain and when the user logs in they have their personal drive mounted and their home directory is changed. I haven’t tried this stuff, but it sounds awesome for a corporate workstation or thin client.