I am new to managing my own Redhat Linux ES box.

I have added a login capability to a program I have written, asking the user to log in using a LINUX username and to supply the correct LINUX password. I have gotten a lot of help from pwauth source code.

The problem is, I can't get password authentication to work on my standalone LINUX ES box. I first wrote my user password authentication routine to use the routines getpwnam() and crypt() but that didn't work since /etc/passwd seems to only contain "x" for passwords. I see that /etc/shadow has the real password in it and am guessing my box is configured to use PAM for user password authentication.

I have modified my program to instead use PAM for password authentication the same way pwauth does: pam_start() followed by pam_authenticate(). The problem is that pam_authenticate always returns 'Authentication failure' even though I am using a valid username and password.

Is it possible my system is using shadow passwords without PAM?

I can supply my source code if it would help.

Thank you!
Julie

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