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The man page for the authconfig command in authconfig-4.1.6-1 claims that it edits the file /etc/sysconfig/auth, but in fact it appears to edit /etc/sysconfig/authconfig. Also, I can't find any evidence that anything actually uses the information, or at least some of it, that's put into this configuration file. For example, what uses "USEMD5"? A pointer would be appreciated.
One more thing I forgot to mention.... Although the authconfig program creates or edits the file /etc/sysconfig/authconfig, it isn't included in the RPM, i.e., when it's first created, the RPM database has no idea what package to associate it with.
Also, it appears that authconfig creates /etc/ldap.conf and /etc/yp.conf, and they aren't listed in its RPM either.
The package will own the file, and the man page will be corrected in 4.1.10. The /etc/ldap.conf and /etc/yp.conf files are owned by the nss_ldap and ypbind packages, respectively, but authconfig will write out empty files if they are not installed. The /etc/sysconfig/authconfig file is used to track configuration settings which can not be determined by examining the filesystem. For example, you can determine if a system is using Shadow by checking if there's a file named /etc/shadow, but you can't easily determine if a system is configured to use MD5 passwords (the fallback mechanism, scanning /etc/pam.d/system-auth, is not as dependable).