What do I need to do so that pamtest allows me to authenticate for any user?
Have you tried running it as root?
(The same way, like 'su' allows me to become any other user, from my given shell session, if I know that user's password)
On my system su is setuid root (-rwsr-xr-x root root su).
I am aware that I have very little understanding of PAM, and I would be happy to remain as ignorant as I am, if I just get that little task working.
In my experience your application has to be run setuid root in order to authentication other users (as it must load PAM, which must be able to read /etc/shadow, or other auth sources as the case may be). I would suggest that this is still better than using a custom setuid program to directly compare against /etc/shadow as you gain the modularity of later moving users into your database, ldap, ... fill in the blank... ;)
Hope that helps! Nate Yocom
_______________________________________________ Pam-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/pam-list