[gentoo-user] [OT?] /etc/shadow perms group shadow?

[Michael Higgins]

I have a question which may or may not be Gentoo-specific, but here goes:

An application runs as a web server. In this application I have hooks to PAM. The results I was getting from attempting to authorize against PAM were fruitless, until I looked at making a way for the user running this to read /etc/shadow.

At any rate, I wound up making a group "shadow" and making /etc/shadow owned by group shadow and group-readable, adding my user to this group. Now it works great.

Isn't this something Gentoo should have a mechanism for handling already, or am I totally off the mark here? Does anyone know if this ability to read /etc/shadow to authenticate on a system is somehow deprecated in favor of something else, or just overlooked in Gentoo land... or what? '-)

Cheers,

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 michael.higgins[at]evolone[dot]org