Securing the system login

The default settings applied to system login are based on what Red Hat deems basic security. If, for some reason, you want to change this, this recipe will show you a couple of examples. Authconfig has two tools that you can use to configure authentication: authconfig and authconfig-tui.

These two tools configure pam for you in such a way that the changes are consistent throughout rpm updates.

The authconfig-tui tool is not as feature-rich as the plan authconfig tool, which I personally recommend you to use as it allows you to do more.

You can manually edit the files located in /etc/pam.d if and when you know what you're doing, but this is not recommended.

How to do it…

Perform the following steps:

First, change the hash encryption of the passwords stored in /etc/shadow to sha512, as follows:

~]# authconfig --passalgo=sha512 --update

Enable NIS authentication through the following command:

~]# authconfig --enablenis –nisdomain=NISDOMAIN --nisserver=nisserver.example.com...