I am a newbie in these environs so please be patient.

I am running suse linux under vm on the mainframe. I want to configure pam to authenticate to ldap on the mainframe. I basically know the changes I need to make but I can easily see mistakes made and if I mess something up for ssh, how will I be able to fix it if I can not login? I thought about installing telnet as a backup to ssh but I really don't want to do that. Is there a better backup method to use in case I mess something up so badly that I can not connect/login with ssh?

Thanks in advance for any help!

well do you have access to the terminal? if so don't worry about it, just backup your ssh file

cp /etc/pam.d/ssh /etc/pam.d/ssh.bckup

and if you run into problems, then just login via the termial and restore it

cp /etc/pam.d/ssh.nckup /etc/pam.d/ssh

Try this out for a how-to

http://www.yourhowto.org/content/view/35/9/