Compatibility issues with authentication modules

Only specific HCL Informix® products support authentication modules. To use the other products when an authentication module is enabled on HCL Informix, you can connect to a DBSERVERALIASES.

Not all HCL Informix products and tools support PAM or LDAP authentication:

• HCL Informix-4GL does not have a mechanism for identifying callback functions and therefore cannot directly support PAM or LDAP authentication. However, if HCL Informix-4GL uses the correct version of CSDK, you can write C code that can be called from HCL Informix-4GL to handle the challenge and response protocol. To implement PAM, upgrade to the new CSDK version, modify your applications to register a callback that can handle challenges and responses, and recompile your application.
• Products such as Informix SQL do not handle the challenge and response protocol.
• The DB-Access, dbexport, dbimport, dbload, and dbschema utilities support PAM. If they receive a challenge, they pass the challenge to the user and wait for a response. This process is repeated for each challenge that the PAM module raises.
• The onmode, onstat, and oncheck server administration utilities do not use PAM. However, because these utilities operate on all HCL Informix ports, the utilities can function with a PAM-enabled port.
• Other server utilities do not support PAM.

If you are using any tools that do not support PAM or LDAP authentication modules, then make connections to a DBSERVERALIASES that does not have the PAM parameters in the sqlhosts file.