One of our users has asked me to help with PAM authentication for Apache 2 on one of our remote servers.
Note: going with mod_auth_pam was decision made without me, and I was only asked to help get the chosen solution work. This being said, the recommended way to do external authentication for Apache 2 now is to use the mod_authz_external module and pwauth password authenticator.
It did seem like a rather trivial task – download mod_auth_pam, compile it for Apache 2, make sure everything works. The remote server uses NIS, I could freely log onto it.
And you know what? It didn’t work!