pam_mount module

pam_mount is an open source command-line software, a module for the PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module) application, especially designed to allow users to easily mount volumes for a user session.

Handles SMB and NCP file systems

It is aimed at Linux-based desktop environments that use SMB (Samba/Windows NT) or NCP (Netware/Mars-NWE) servers that UNIX users wish to access transparently. It facilitates access to private volumes of these types well.

Additionally, the pam_mount software can also handle file systems based on the well known FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) project, CIFS (Common Internet File System) file systems, as well as various encrypted (crypto) file systems.

Can be used to mount Home directories

This PAM module also enables users to mount Home directories using loopback encrypted filesystems. pam_mount has been designed to work with all GNU/Linux operating systems, as well as with several flavors of BSD, including FreeBSD, and Solaris OSes.

The project can be installed on 32 and 64-bit machines and has been written entirely in the C programming language. Is is currently distributed for free under the GPLv2 and LGPLv2 licenses.

Getting started with pam_mount

To install and use the pam_mount software on your GNU/Linux distribution, you will have to download the latest release from either Softoware or via the project’s homepage, save the archive on a location of your choice, and use an archive manager utility to unpack it.

Make sure that PAM and the libHX library are installed before attempting to install pam_mount. Open a terminal emulator software and navigate to the location where you have extracted the archive file (e.g. cd /home/softoware/pam_mount-2.15).

There, run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile the program. After a successful compilation process, run the ‘sudo make install’ command to install pam_mount system wide and make it available to all users on your machine.

What is new in this release:

• Enhancements:
• pam_mount: add an "allow_discard" option for volumes to enable trim support on the block device without enabling it for the filesystem.
• config: regexes can now be used for the and configuration options
• Fixes:
• fix "feature 1 already set to zero"
• pmt-ehd: avoid miscalculating blockdev size obtained from BLKGETSIZE64
• pam_mount: give more verbose output on "unknown digest/cipher"
• pam_mount: fix crash when an unknown digest/cipher was specified
• pam_mount: correctly mkdir mountpoint if requested
• pam_mount: only remove mountpoint if actually created
• config: restore DOMAIN_USER and DOMAIN_NAME expansion in mount options
• Changes:
• Complain louder when EUID is not 0
• Make CIFS mounts work again after util-linux option parser update. util-linux has received updates to its option parser in or around v2.22, and pam_mount was incorrectly using the "user" moutn option to specify a username; the proper option is, of course, "username". (as in: )
• Make Winbind user logins (DOMAIN\user) work with cifs-utils > 5.5

What is new in version 2.11:

• Networked volumes do not require a "server" attribute anymore, which allows integration with pam_winbind and Active Directory. Multiple diagnostics were added to umount.crypt to help determine details of potential failures.

What is new in version 2.9:

• This version added support for bound and moving mounts and fixed an assertion triggering in pmt-ehd.

What is new in version 2.8:

• Initialization of supplemental groups for FUSE mounts was corrected to not truncate groups added by pam_group.

What is new in version 2.7:

• The use of the "%(shell ...)" function in the master configuration file is now possible.

What is new in version 2.6:

• This release suppresses stdout from mount programs.

What is new in version 1.33:

• This release suppresses stdout from mount programs.

What is new in version 1.32:

• An issue where Luserconf volumes were not mounted after a recent change to only ask for passwords when there are volumes defined was fixed.
• Arbitrary source paths can now be used with tmpfs.

What is new in version 1.31:

• A NULL-dereference crash in the login was fixed.