pwauth - authenticator for mod_authnz_external and the Apache HTTP Daemon

pwauth was written by Jan Wolter <jan@unixpapa.com>.

       This manual page was written by Hai Zaar <haizaar@haizaar.com>, for the Debian project (but may  be  used
       by others).

                                                   2009-05-02                                          PWAUTH(8)

       Pwauth  is  an  authenticator  designed  to be used with mod_auth_external or mod_authnz_external and the
       Apache HTTP Daemon to support reasonably secure web authentication out of the system password database on
       most versions of Unix. Particularly - secure authentication against PAM.

       The simplest test pwauth is to start a root shell and just run pwauth. It will attempt to read the  login
       and  password from standard input, so type a login name, hit return, then type a password, and hit return
       (the password will echo on your screen). The check the status code  that  was  returned  (in  csh:  "echo
       $status" in sh: "echo $?").

       If  the  login/password  were  correct you should get a zero status code. If not, you will get some other
       value. See below the list of status codes to find the meaning of the various values returned. Any  values
       50 or greater indicate a configuration error.

       pwauth - authenticator for mod_authnz_external and the Apache HTTP Daemon

0STATUS_OK
              Login OK.

       1STATUS_UNKNOWN
              Nonexistent login or (for some configurations) incorrect password.

       2STATUS_INVALID
              Incorrect password (for some configurations).

       3STATUS_BLOCKED
              Uid number is below MIN_UNIX_UID value configured in config.h.

       4STATUS_EXPIRED
              Login ID has expired.

       5STATUS_PW_EXPIRED
              Login's password has expired.

       6SSTATUS_NOLOGIN
              Logins to system have been turned off (usually by /etc/nologin file).

       7STATUS_MANYFAILES
              Limit on number of bad logins exceeded.

       50STATUS_INT_USER
              pwauth  was invoked by a uid not on the SERVER_UIDS list. If you get this error code, you probably
              have SERVER_UIDS set incorrectly in pwauth's config.h file.

       51STATUS_INT_ARGS
              pwauth was not  given  a  login  &  password  to  check.  The  means  the  passing  of  data  from
              mod_auth_external  to  pwauth is messed up. Most likely one is trying to pass data via environment
              variables, while the other is trying to pass data via a pipe.

       52STATUS_INT_ERR
              one of several rare and unlikely internal errors occurred. You'll have to read the source code  to
              figure these out.

       53STATUS_INT_NOROOT
              pwauth  was  not able to read the password database. Usually this means it is not running as root.
              (PAM and login.conf configurations will return 1 in this case.)

pwauth