Hi

I'm trying to learn PAM on RHEL5 and frankly speaking it is not so easy.
My question is, how often sys admins use this feature ?
Is it worth to learn this ?

thx for help.

I regularly perform basic PAM tweaks on RHEL for pam_passwdqc(8) and pam_access(8). Both are invaluable to me.

What's your goal? (Why do you want to learn PAM?)

Becasue I want to pass RCE exam.

Honestly, that doesn't seem like actual reasoning why you want to learn about PAM. Is it because you just want to learn about it, and make use of it? Or just to pass the exam? Those exams are available to certify you on tasks that require specific knowledge, and not just a piece of paper that gets you a job. You should be able to ask yourself that very question, and be able to answer it in a way that will help your knowledge and experience, and not just that job that you want. I'm not putting you down at all, it's what it should really mean to you.

Cheers,

Josh

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@drManhattan: please read the exam objectives.

• RHCSA exam objectives
• RHCE exam objectives

@anomie I read exam objectives once again and didn't find anythhing about PAM there.
I learned only the basics of PAM and I guess it satisfies my needs for now.

Just "learn enough to go pass your exam." You haven't set for yourself any requirement to actually be able to acquire enough knowledge for yourself to actually use it on the job, should you be lucky enough to bamfoozle someone into actually giving you a job (unlikely), and should you also be BS-artist enough to hoodwink that person into letting you keep it (fuhgeddaboudit).

Ahem.

The real world is not school. Out here, we don't earn our daily bread by "passing tests," although some of us have made a little money by writing a few questions for them from time to time.

"Passing a test" is merely an indicator, not a goal. By studying the exam materials, you do indeed expose yourself to a concentration of knowledge that other professionals (including yours truly...) have opined might be most-useful to you, and that we have prepared in what we hoped would be a palatable format. It's very concentrated food, served to you on a silver platter (that you must pay "silver" for). "Make of this what you will."

What you will get, in the end, is: "what you have made of it," nothing more or less. It could be the start of a great career, or it could be a useless piece of paper that hangs on your wall. If your attitude is merely, "I want to pass this test," then (after the very expensive "tahh-daahhh!!!" fades again into silence, and all the marching-bands have gone home), what you are very likely to be left with is ... the latter.

And I hope the point is not lost on you: learning PAM to pass a cert exam (when it's not listed in the exam objectives) might not be a good use of your time.

PAM is not exactly simple, but it's a valuable framework and collection of utilities. Learning it can make you better at your job and differentiate you from other sysadmins. But I digress. I think you got the feedback you were looking for when you started this thread.