Passwd
======

User is looked up using 'getpwnam()' call, which usually looks into
'/etc/passwd' file, but depending on NSS
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_Service_Switch] configuration it may also
look up the user from eg. LDAP database.

Most commonly used as a user database. Many systems use shadow passwords
nowadays so it doesn't usually work as a password database. BSDs are an
exception to this, they still set the password field even with shadow
passwords.

The lookup is by default done in the auth worker processes. If you have only a
small local passwd file, you can avoid having extra auth worker processes by
disabling it:

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
userdb {
  driver = passwd
  args = blocking=no
}
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Field overriding and extra fields
---------------------------------

It's possible to override fields from passwd and add <extra fields>
[UserDatabase.ExtraFields.txt] with templates. For example:

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
userdb {
  driver = passwd
  args = home=/var/mail/%u mail=maildir:/var/mail/%u/Maildir
}
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

This uses the UID and GID fields from passwd, but home directory is overridden.
Also the default <mail_location> [MailLocation.txt] setting is overridden.

(This file was created from the wiki on 2011-11-16 14:09)