Welcome to pam-abl.

1) Introduction
2) Building
3) Supported databases



1) Introduction
pam_abl is a pam module designed to automatically block hosts which are attempting a brute force attack. Brute force attacks are an unsophisticated way to find authentication credentials. Basically, a computer is setup to try all kinds of user names and password combinations until one works. It may sound fairly far fetched, but it does actually work. Many system accounts have common user names. Passwords are also easily guessable in many situations. 

The latest version is 0.9.0

This version add support for different database modules.  Berkeley DB has been moved into
a module, and Kyoto Cabinet has been added as an option.  Kyoto Cabinet has significantly
better performance.

2) Building
Please skim through CMakeLists.txt to get an idea of which variables can be set for library paths etc.

If you are not familiar with cmake, the basic steps are: 
a. Create a build directory. It can be within the sources.
      mkdir cmake_build
b. cd to that directory
      cd cmake_build
c. call cmake with as argument the top level project directory. This will generate a makefile.
      cmake ../
d. call make
      make

The build process will make 3 targets:
a. The library "pam-abl.so"
b. The commandline tool "pam-abl"
c. A test executable "pam-abl_test". Really handy for testing it with different db versions

!!!!!!!!!!
!!! Building using different version of Berkeley db.
!!! See the build file "CMakeLists.txt" for more details.
!!!!!!!!!!


3) Supported databases
The latest version of Kyoto Cabinet (1.2.76)

Currently pam-abl is tested with the following versions of Berkeley db:
 - db-5.3.15
 - db-5.2.42
 - db-5.1.25
 - db-4.8.30
 - db-4.7.25
 - db-4.6.21
 - db-4.5.20
 - db-4.4.20

Versions  <= 4.3 are currently no longer supported.