Re: [gentoo-security] Advice about security solution

[Anders Bruun Olsen <anders@bruun-olsen.net>]

On Sun, Nov 13, 2005 at 08:41:21PM -0500, William Yang wrote:
> >>just curious, by why not use 'net-www/mod_auth_mysql' and store your
> >>users in a MySQL DB?
> >Because I want a single place for storing users that all services will
> >auth against, which also means ssh and so forth. I know that pam_mysql
> >will bring me most of the way, but I have my doubts about using
> >nss_mysql (which is also not in Portage). Call me crazy, but I neither
> >trust the security nor stability of mysql :)
> >Plus I already have experience with LDAP...
> I run a production ISP environment--http/ftp, e-mail, limited user 
> shells, RADIUS dialup auth--using pam_mysql, and have for more than a 
> year.  There have been no stability issues and, to date, no security 
> problems that we've detected.
> The biggest problem has to do with performance, which nscd was excellent 
> for.  NSCD does odd things when the MySQL queries return numbers 
> significantly smaller than the number of rows in the user auth tables -- 
> I found that it would periodically just crash when I had disabled or 
> locked-out accounts.  A daemon which checks and restarts core services 
> was all I needed to take care of it, though.

If you have daemons that crash periodically and needs to be restarted, I
would say that counts as stability issues. At least it does in my book.

But if you can live with it, then it's all good. I prefer the stability
of LDAP however :)

-- 
Anders
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