RE: checkpassword and Mac OS X

Searching for "getpwent" at apple.com revealed this:

	http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=3D30770

A clip says:

	"Lookupd is a daemon that simplifies the tasks of the Unix-style
library routines that need system and network administration
information. ...

Lookupd was created to avoid rewriting all the libc routines any time a
new information service is added. If, for example, we wanted client
processes to get network administration information from a relational
database, we could modify lookupd so it referenced the information in
the database. This would be easier than modifying all the appropriate
libc routines to give them relational database access.

In addition to providing a centralized data access service, lookupd also
caches some information. This caching improves system responsiveness and
decreases network traffic."

If this is part of its underlying OS Darwin, it should get contributed
back to the FreeBSD community (right?). In that case, FreeBSD might move
towards Lookupd down the road...

Dave

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Russell P. Sutherland [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Thursday, April 01, 2004 9:00 AM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: checkpassword and Mac OS X
>=20
> The most recent version of Mac OS X (10.3, Panther)  has a feature
that
> disallows the standard getpwnam function call to return the encrypted
> version of the persons password.
>=20
> I've got a clumsy work around for this problem that uses
> the Mac OS X specific authentication libraries.
>=20
> I tried using the checkpassword-pam tool hoping
> that pam would hide all this abstraction with out
> success.
>=20
> Has any one else experienced this non-portability
> feature with Mac OS X?
>=20
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