pam_mount — Pluggable Authentication Module to mount volumes for a user session

News

Dec 15 2011 — pam_mount 2.13 released

This release restores keyfile support for non-crypto mounts. A new cryptmount library is shipped that contains the code shared among pam_mount and its utilities. libmount from util-linux 2.20 is now utilized in part as well.

Oct 06 2011 — pam_mount 2.12 released

This release restores support in mount.crypt for files >=4GB.

Aug 07 2011 — pam_mount 2.11 released

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.

pam_mount is a Pluggable Authentication Module that can mount volumes for a user session

This module is aimed at environments with central file servers that a user wishes to mount on login and unmount on logout, such as (semi-)diskless stations where many users can logon and where statically mounting the entire /home from a server is a security risk, or listing all possible volumes in /etc/fstab is not feasible.

Users can define their own list of volumes without having to change (possibly non-writable) global config files.
Single sign-on feature — the user needs to type the password just once
Transparent mount process
No stored passwords
Volumes are unmounted on logout, freeing system resources and not leaving data exposed.

The module also supports mounting local filesystems of any kind the normal mount utility supports, with extra code to make sure certain volumes are set up properly because often they need more than just a mount call, such as encrypted volumes. This includes SMB/CIFS, NCP, FUSE, dm-crypt and LUKS.