---
name: "pwauth"
section: "8"
platform: "linux"
package: "pwauth"
version: "2.3.11-6"
release: "Debian 13 (Trixie)"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/pwauth"
---

# pwauth(8)

authenticator for mod\_authnz\_external and the Apache HTTP Daemon

## NAME

pwauth - authenticator for mod\_authnz\_external and the Apache HTTP Daemon

## SYNOPSIS

**pwauth**

## DESCRIPTION

Pwauth is an authenticator designed to be used with mod\_auth\_external or mod\_authnz\_external and the Apache HTTP Daemon to support reasonably secure web authentication out of the system password database on most versions of Unix. Particularly - secure authentication against PAM.

The simplest test pwauth is to start a root shell and just run pwauth. It will attempt to read the login and password from standard input, so type a login name, hit return, then type a password, and hit return (the password will echo on your screen). The check the status code that was returned (in csh: "echo $status" in sh: "echo $?").

If the login/password were correct you should get a zero status code. If not, you will get some other value. See below the list of status codes to find the meaning of the various values returned. Any values 50 or greater indicate a configuration error.

## STATUS CODES

- **0 STATUS\_OK**

  Login OK.

- **1 STATUS\_UNKNOWN**

  Nonexistent login or (for some configurations) incorrect password.

- **2 STATUS\_INVALID**

  Incorrect password (for some configurations).

- **3 STATUS\_BLOCKED**

  Uid number is below MIN\_UNIX\_UID value configured in config.h.

- **4 STATUS\_EXPIRED**

  Login ID has expired.

- **5 STATUS\_PW\_EXPIRED**

  Login's password has expired.

- **6 SSTATUS\_NOLOGIN**

  Logins to system have been turned off (usually by /etc/nologin file).

- **7 STATUS\_MANYFAILES**

  Limit on number of bad logins exceeded.

- **50 STATUS\_INT\_USER**

  pwauth was invoked by a uid not on the SERVER\_UIDS list. If you get this error code, you probably have SERVER\_UIDS set incorrectly in pwauth's config.h file.

- **51 STATUS\_INT\_ARGS**

  pwauth was not given a login & password to check. The means the passing of data from mod\_auth\_external to pwauth is messed up. Most likely one is trying to pass data via environment variables, while the other is trying to pass data via a pipe.

- **52 STATUS\_INT\_ERR**

  one of several rare and unlikely internal errors occurred. You'll have to read the source code to figure these out.

- **53 STATUS\_INT\_NOROOT**

  pwauth was not able to read the password database. Usually this means it is not running as root. (PAM and login.conf configurations will return 1 in this case.)

## AUTHOR

**pwauth** was written by Jan Wolter \<jan@unixpapa.com\>.

This manual page was written by Hai Zaar \<haizaar@haizaar.com\>, for the Debian project (but may be used by others).