Rethinking PAM

PAM, Pluggable Authentication Modules, originated in Solaris and became common place in all Linux, BSDs, and AIX, HP-UX and macOS. MariaDB has had PAM support as an option since MariaDB 5.2.10 becoming stable in 10.0.11. So if this is all old and boring why reconsider it? The environment in which Linux operates with PAM has changed in the last 15 years.

Basic Blocks: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Four-colorful-building-blocks-vector-image/29819.html

MariaDB’s PAM plugin version 1 (as its become known) has a restriction, because the pam module loaded was loaded into the mariadbd executable, it was subject to the restricted permissions, normally just the user, that mariadbd runs.

openSUSE 12.3 released with MariaDB as default

Congratulations to the openSUSE community on a successful release of openSUSE 12.3. A highlight worth mentioning is that MariaDB is now the default as opposed to MySQL. What are you waiting for, download it!

From the features list, here’s an excerpt focusing on MariaDB & MySQL:

openSUSE has moved from MySQL to MariaDB as default. MariaDB was first shipped with openSUSE 11.3 back in 2010. Over the years it proved itself and starting with 12.3 openSUSE is replacing default MySQL implementation with MariaDB. This means that whole distribution is compiled against MariaDB and in ‘M’ in LAMP means MariaDB from now.