Hi Thanks for your reply! > I don't recall the apache process crashing -- but some > investigation revealed that pam_pwdb.so wouldn't do the > authentication on a system with shadow passwords unless > it was called with root privs. Apache doesn't do this. > (as opposed to login/imapd/pop3d/ftpd/etc...). I think that's right. It's pretty strange. Even if I use 'pam_permit.so' the process dies... I don't know why? It works fine on an NIS-Client, but not on a standalone-machine. Yours sincerely Christian Westphal